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Frontmatter Config

Frontmatter is widely used and documented way to add metadata to your Markdown documents. Every Markdown file accepts an optional YAML frontmatter block at the top. Bark falls back to sensible defaults for anything you skip, so a minimal file with no frontmatter at all is completely valid and a reasonable starting point.

yaml
---
title: Configuration
description: appsettings.json options, docs/config.json, and theming
---

Note

Bark reads frontmatter keys using camelCase (lastUpdated, not last_updated). Fields that do not match the expected name are quietly ignored.

Fields ​

Field Type Default Description
title string filename or nav-configured title Page title. Shows in the browser tab, breadcrumbs, and pagination links.
description string none Meta description. Also shows under the title in search results and llms.txt.
layout string none Set to home to render a hero and features grid instead of standard docs chrome. See Home Page.
hero object none Hero content. Only used when layout: home.
features array none Feature cards. Only used when layout: home.
keywords string[] none A list of keywords for the page. Emitted as <meta name="keywords"> in the page head (capped at 20 entries) and also indexed by Bark's search at a higher weight than body text.
lastUpdated bool inherits site-wide setting Set to false to hide the "Last updated" stamp on this page, overriding the site-wide setting. See Last Updated Timestamp.
pagination bool true Set to false to hide the previous and next page links at the bottom of this page. Useful for standalone landing pages or pages that do not fit naturally into a linear reading order.
toc bool true Set to false to hide the table of contents on this page.
redirect string none When set, Bark issues a redirect to the given URL instead of rendering the page. See Redirects below.
date string (ISO 8601) none Content creation date. Overrides the file system timestamp for the "Last updated" display when updated is not also set.
updated string (ISO 8601) none Last-modified date. Takes priority over date and the file system timestamp for the "Last updated" display.

title and description work on every page. layout, hero, and features only apply when layout: home is set. lastUpdated, pagination, and toc only have a visible effect when their respective site-wide features are active.

TIP

Bark does not currently support a per-page sidebar: false toggle. Every page that resolves to a .md file receives a sidebar automatically. See Sidebar for options around structuring and scoping sidebar navigation.

Redirects ​

The redirect field is a convenient way to forward readers from an old URL to a new one without breaking existing bookmarks or inbound links. When Bark serves a page that has redirect set, it issues a temporary (307) redirect to the target URL instead of rendering any content, so the body of the .md file does not matter.

Root-relative paths (starting with /) are automatically prefixed with your configured base path, so redirect: /guide/getting-started will resolve correctly whether Bark is served from the domain root or from a subpath like /docs. Absolute URLs starting with http:// or https:// are passed through exactly as written.

yaml
---
redirect: /guide/getting-started
---

A particularly useful pattern is page renaming. If you move old-name.md to new-name.md, you can leave the old file in place with a redirect pointing to the new location. Readers who bookmarked or linked to the old URL will arrive at the right page without noticing the change.

Dates ​

By default, the "Last updated" display at the bottom of a page reflects the file's last-modified time on disk. This works well when your content and your files stay in sync, but it can produce surprising results when files are moved, renamed in bulk, or downloaded fresh by a deployment tool that stamps everything with today's date.

The date and updated fields let you pin the displayed date directly in the frontmatter. When updated is present it takes priority over date, and either one overrides the file's last-modified time completely.

yaml
---
date: 2025-03-01
updated: 2025-06-28
---

A sensible convention is to set date when a page is first written and then set or update updated whenever you revise the content significantly. Pages that omit both fields continue to use the file's last-modified time as before, so you can adopt explicit dates incrementally, one page at a time, without touching anything else.

Title fallback order ​

When title is missing from frontmatter, Bark picks one in this order:

  1. The filename, title-cased (getting-started.md becomes "Getting Started").
  2. If the file is index.md, the parent folder name is used instead.
  3. If config.json's nav or sidebar configures a title for this page's path, that title takes priority over the filename.

A title set in frontmatter always overrides all of the above.

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Last updated: 2026-06-29

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