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mkdocs-material/docs/setup/setting-up-social-cards.md
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Setting up social cards

Material for MkDocs can automatically create beautiful social cards for your documentation, which appear as link previews on social media platforms. You can select from a variety of pre-designed layouts or create custom layouts to match your unique style and branding.

Layout default variant

Social card of formatting reference.

Configuration

Built-in social plugin

:octicons-tag-24: 8.5.0 · :octicons-cpu-24: Plugin · :octicons-beaker-24: Experimental

The built-in social plugin automatically generate a custom preview image for each page. Install all [dependencies for image processing]1 and add the following lines to mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
  - social

Note that Insiders contains a ground up rewrite of the social plugin that generates images much more efficiently in parallel and allows to build entirely custom layouts.

The following configuration options are available:

enabled{ #+social.enabled }

:octicons-milestone-24: Default: true – This option specifies whether the plugin is enabled when building your project. If you want to speed up local builds, you can use an environment variable:

plugins:
  - social:
      enabled: !ENV [CI, false]
concurrency{ #+social.concurrency }

:octicons-tag-24: insiders-4.33.0 · :octicons-milestone-24: Default: number of CPUs – How many CPUs the plugin is allowed to use when generating social cards. With more CPUs, the plugin can do more work in the same time, thus complete generation faster. Concurrent processing can be disabled with:

plugins:
  - social:
      concurrency: 1

Social cards

The following configuration options are available for social card generation:

cards{ #+social.cards }

:octicons-milestone-24: Default: true – This option specifies whether to generate social card images. If you want to switch the plugin off, e.g. for local builds, you can use an environment variable:

plugins:
  - social:
      cards: !ENV [CI, false]
cards_dir{ #+social.cards_dir }

:octicons-milestone-24: Default: assets/images/social – This option specifies where the generated social cards will be stored. While it's usually not necessary to change this option, change it with:

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_dir: assets/images/social
cards_color{ #+social.cards_color }

:octicons-milestone-24: Default: theme.palette.primary – This option specifies the colors for the background fill and foreground text when generating the social card:

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_color:
        fill: "#0FF1CE"
        text: "#FFFFFF"

!!! warning "If you're using Insiders, use cards_layout_params"

cards_font{ #+social.cards_font }

:octicons-milestone-24: Default: theme.font.text – This option specifies which font to use for rendering the social card, which can be any font hosted on Google Fonts:

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_font: Ubuntu

!!! warning "If you're using Insiders, use cards_layout_params"

cards_layout_dir{ #+social.cards_layout_dir }

:octicons-tag-24: insiders-4.33.0 · :octicons-milestone-24: Default: project root – This option specifies where the social plugin should try to resolve custom layouts from, taking precedence over the included layouts:

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_layout_dir: .overrides/social/layouts
cards_layout{ #+social.cards_layout } :material-alert-decagram:{ .mdx-pulse title="Added on May 8, 2023" }

:octicons-tag-24: insiders-4.33.0 · :octicons-milestone-24: Default: default – Layout specification the social card should use. The plugin includes the following layouts which make use of the color palette and font:

=== "default"

``` yaml
plugins:
  - social:
      cards_layout: default
```

This layout uses the configured [primary color] as a background:

[![Layout default]][Layout default]

=== "default/variant"

``` yaml
plugins:
  - social:
      cards_layout: default/variant
```

This layout includes the [page icon] as a watermark, if defined:

[![Layout default variant]][Layout default variant]

=== "default/accent"

``` yaml
plugins:
  - social:
      cards_layout: default/accent
```

This layout uses the configured [accent color] as a background:

[![Layout default accent]][Layout default accent]

=== "default/invert"

``` yaml
plugins:
  - social:
      cards_layout: default/invert
```

This layout inverts the background and foreground colors:

[![Layout default invert]][Layout default invert]

All of the default layouts use the following variables:

  • :material-page-layout-header: – config.site_name
  • :material-page-layout-body: – page.meta.title or page.title
  • :material-page-layout-footer: – page.meta.description or config.site_description
  • :material-page-layout-sidebar-right: – theme.logo or theme.icon.logo
cards_layout_params{ #+social.cards_layout_params }

:octicons-tag-24: insiders-4.33.0 · :octicons-milestone-24: Default: none – This option allows to set parameters as provided by the layout specification. For custom layouts, this key can be used to provide layout-specific options, making layouts entirels configurable.

All default layouts specify the following parameters:

background_color{ #+social.cards_layout_params.background_color }

Set a background color, which can be a CSS color keyword, a 3, 4, 6 or 8 letter HEX color code. Alpha channels are supported as well:

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_layout_params:
        background_color: "#0FF1CE"
background_image{ #+social.cards_layout_params.background_image }

Set a background image. If a background_color is set, like for the default layouts, the image is tinted (overlayed) with the color. Thus, the background color must be (partially) transparent for the image to become visible:

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_layout_params:
        background_color: "#00000000"
        background_image: .overrides/social/background.png

The path of the image must be defined relative to the project root.

color{ #+social.cards_layout_params.color }

Set a foreground color, which can be a CSS color keyword, a 3, 4, 6 or 8 letter HEX color code. The color is primarily used to tint text and icons:

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_layout_params:
        color: "#0FF1CE"
font_family{ #+social.cards_layout_params.font_family }

Set a font family. This overrides the font that is set as part of the theme configuration. The built-in social plugin will automatically download the font from Google Fonts:

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_layout_params:
        font_family: Ubuntu

Caching

The built-in social plugin implements an intelligent caching mechanism, ensuring that social cards are only re-generated when they're not contained in the cache or their contents change. If any of the variables used in a layout changes, the plugin will detect it and re-generate the card.

The following configuration options are available for caching:

cache{ #+social.cache }

:octicons-tag-24: insiders-4.33.0 · :octicons-milestone-24: Default: true – Whether the plugin queries its cache for an existing artifact before starting a generation job. It's normally not necessary to change this setting, except for when debugging the plugin itself. Caching can be disabled with:

plugins:
  - social:
      cache: false
cache_dir{ #+social.cache_dir }

:octicons-milestone-24: Default: .cache/plugins/social – This option specifies the file system location of the plugin's cache. It's normally not necessary to change this setting, except for when debugging the plugin itself. The cache directory can be changed with:

plugins:
  - social:
      cache_dir: .cache/plugins/social

By default, all built-in plugins that implement caching will create a .cache directory in the same folder your mkdocs.yml resides, and create subfolders to not interfere with each other. If you use multiple instances of this plugin, it could be necessary to change this setting.

Usage

If you want to adjust the title or set a custom description for the social card, you can set the front matter title and description properties, which take precedence over the default values.

Choosing a font

Some fonts do not contain CJK characters, like for example the default font, Roboto. In case your site_name, site_description, or page title contain CJK characters, choose another font from Google Fonts which comes with CJK characters, e.g. one from the Noto Sans font family:

=== "Chinese (Simplified)"

``` yaml
plugins:
  - social:
      cards_font: Noto Sans SC
```

=== "Chinese (Traditional)"

``` yaml
plugins:
  - social:
      cards_font: Noto Sans TC
```

=== "Japanese"

``` yaml
plugins:
  - social:
      cards_font: Noto Sans JP
```

=== "Korean"

``` yaml
plugins:
  - social:
      cards_font: Noto Sans KR
```

Customization

Custom layouts

:octicons-heart-fill-24:{ .mdx-heart } Sponsors only{ .mdx-insiders } · :octicons-tag-24: insiders-4.33.0 · :octicons-beaker-24: Experimental

!!! info "Custom layout guide coming shortly"

We're working hard to explain in detail how to build custom layouts. If you
want to start to build a custom layout right away before we finish the guide,
check out the [source code of the `default` layout](https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material-insiders/blob/master/src/plugins/social/layouts/default.yml)
and watch the [demo on Twitter](https://twitter.com/squidfunk/status/1654832324272431104).

Parameters

  1. The awesome thing about social cards is that they are generated during build time and directly distributed with your documentation, no external services involved. While it would technically be simpler to generate social cards using a web browser and an automation framework like Puppeteer, it would add further liabilities to the toolchain, with the potential to make build pipelines more complex and resource intense.

    For this reason, Material for MkDocs again follows its core principle of making it as simple and powerful as possible, providing an easy-to-use framework for building custom layouts using Python image processing libraries. Additionally, this means that there's no necessity for internet access in CI environments. ↩︎