Organize Files

Nextra first collects all your Markdown files and configurations from the pages directory, and then generates the “page map information” of your entire site, to render things such as the navigation bar and sidebar below:

Example of Nextra Theme Docs — Example: Nextra Docs Theme has sidebar and navbar generated automatically from Markdown files.

Default Behavior

By default, the page map contains all .md and .mdx filenames and the directory structure, sorted alphabetically. Then, Nextra will use the title package to get formatted page names from filenames.

For example if you have the following structure:

- contact.md
- index.mdx
- - legal.md
  - index.mdx

The resolved page map will be (note that all names were sorted alphabetically):

[
  {
    "name": "About",
    "children": [{ "name": "Index" }, { "name": "Legal" }]
  },
  { "name": "Contact" },
  { "name": "Index" }
]

And the global page map will be bundled to each page by Nextra. Then, configured theme will render the actual UI with that page map.

`_meta.js`

It’s very common to customize each page’s title, rather than just relying on filenames. Having a page titled “Index” lacks clarity. It is preferable to assign a meaningful title that accurately represents the content, such as “Home”.

That’s where _meta.js comes in. You can have an _meta.js file in each directory, and it will be used to override the default configuration of each page:

- _meta.js
- contact.md
- index.mdx
- - _meta.js
  - legal.md
  - index.mdx

For example, you can put this in your pages/_meta.js file:

pages/_meta.js

export default {
  index: 'My Homepage',
  contact: 'Contact Us',
  about: 'About Us'
}

It tells Nextra the order of each page, and the correct title.

It’s also possible to use the jsx,ts,tsx extensions for _meta files (e.g. _meta.ts).
You can use ESLint’s built-in rule sort keys with a /* eslint sort-keys: error */ comment to sort your sidebar items alphabetically.

Alternatively, you can do it with title property and have other configurations in there as well:

pages/_meta.js

export default {
  index: 'My Homepage',
  contact: 'Contact Us',
  about: {
    title: 'About Us',
    '...extra configurations...': '...'
  }
}

⚠️

If you are using next-sitemap, you will probably need to add exclude: ['*/_meta'] to your next-sitemap.config.js file, as it is tricky to exclude _meta files from the build.

The extra configurations are passed to the theme as additional information. Check the corresponding pages for more information:

Docs Theme Blog Theme