Docusaurus: Update the sidebar.js by a docusaurus lifecycle

[itelofilho]

🚀 Feature

I want to write a plugin that will update the sidebar.js

Motivation

I'm planning to write a plugin for docusaurus that will look to my components and generate the docs automatically using react-docgen. So I need a way to update the sidebar using this plugin.

[mnbf9rca]

Yes - having the sidebar auto-generate based on the content, folder/file structure in /docs etc. would make content management so much easier.

[ghominejad]

@mnbf9rca Try this plugin, i've just published it to npm

https://github.com/acrobit/docusaurus-plugin-auto-sidebars

You can override the name or the order of folders in the sidebars.yaml file.

[yangshun]

Plugins lifecycles are generic across the whole website, not coupled to any plugin, such as docs. So it wouldn't make sense to add a plugin lifecycle for updating sidebars. We either need to modify the existing docs plugin or something or build an entirely new docs plugin.

Alternatively, we could add a plugin lifecycle called initialization() where you can write your own code to generate a sidebars.js file, but you can easily add a command that does that yourself before you run yarn start/build in package.json.

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "./generate-sidebars.js && docusaurus start",
    "build": "./generate-sidebars.js && docusaurus build"
  }
}