Configuration

Bark splits configuration into two files:

• appsettings.json: host-level concerns. Where the docs folder lives, whether hot reload is on, theme colors. Set per deployment, and applied on restart.
• docs/config.json: content-level concerns. Site title and metadata, brand text, navigation, footer, social links. Set per project and hot-reloaded alongside your Markdown, so no restart is needed.

That split means a content editor never needs deploy access just to fix a typo in the brand name.

This page covers what you will touch first. For the field-by-field list, see Site Config. If you run Bark in a container, Environment Variables gives the equivalent variable names.

appsettings.json ​

These settings belong to the Docs section:

{
  "Docs": {
    "RootPath": "../../docs",
    "DefaultPage": "index",
    "EnableHotReload": true,
    "BasePath": "/your-repo"
  }
}

Colors, fonts, and your own CSS or JS are a separate concern, covered in Themes.

docs/config.json ​

This file covers your site's title, HTML metadata, navigation, footer, and social links. Navigation has the most moving parts, so it gets the space below. For everything else, see Site Config.

Navigation has three levels of control, and they mix:

1. Do nothing. With no nav, sidebar, or topNav, Bark builds the left sidebar from your folder structure.
2. One flat sidebar (nav) for the whole site. Good for small doc sets that need no header bar.
3. A header nav with dropdowns (topNav) plus a different sidebar per section (sidebar, keyed by path prefix). This is what most multi-section sites want.

{
  "brand": "Bark",
  "topNav": [
    { "text": "Home", "link": "/" },
    { "text": "Guide", "link": "/guide/getting-started" },
    { "text": "Reference", "link": "/reference/site-config" },
    {
      "text": "More",
      "items": [
        { "text": "GitHub", "link": "https://github.com/melosso/bark" },
        { "text": "Releases", "link": "https://github.com/melosso/bark/releases" }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sidebar": {
    "/guide/": [
      {
        "title": "Introduction",
        "items": [
          { "title": "Getting Started", "path": "guide/getting-started" },
          { "title": "Configuration", "path": "guide/configuration" },
          { "title": "Routing", "path": "guide/routing" },
          { "title": "Deploy", "path": "guide/deploy" }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "/reference/": [
      {
        "title": "Reference",
        "items": [
          { "title": "Site Config", "path": "reference/site-config" },
          { "title": "API Reference", "path": "reference/api-reference" },
          { "title": "Sitemap & Crawlers", "path": "reference/sitemap-generation" }
        ]
      }
    ]
  },
  "socialLinks": [
    { "icon": "github", "url": "https://github.com/melosso/bark", "title": "GitHub" }
  ]
}

A topNav item is either a direct link (text plus link) or a dropdown (text plus items, no link). Those are the only two shapes.

sidebar keys are path prefixes, and the longest match for the current page wins. That lets /guide/ and /guide/advanced/ coexist, with the more specific key taking over for pages beneath it.

footer is rendered as Markdown, so links and formatting work as expected. For social links, an icon of "github" or "mastodon" renders as an inline SVG; any other value renders as plain text.