Setting up social cards¶

Social cards, also known as social previews, are images that are displayed when a link to your project documentation is shared on social media. Material for MkDocs can generate beautiful social cards automatically, using the colors, fonts and logo¹ defined in mkdocs.yml, e.g.:

Configuration¶

Built-in social plugin¶

8.5.0 · Plugin · Experimental

First, ensure you've installed all dependencies and have a valid site_url, as social preview images must be referenced via absolute URLs. Then, add the following lines to mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
  - social

The following configuration options are available:

cards

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 [CARDS, false]

cards_color

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" # (1)!
        text: "#FFFFFF"

1. Colors can either be defined as HEX colors, or as CSS color keywords. Note that HEX colors must be enclosed in quotes.

cards_font

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: Roboto

Why do social cards render boxes for CJK languages?

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)Chinese (Traditional)JapaneseKorean

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_font: Noto Sans SC

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_font: Noto Sans TC

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_font: Noto Sans JP

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_font: Noto Sans KR

cards_dir

Default: assets/images/social – This option specifies where the generated social card images will be written to. It's normally not necessary to change this option:

plugins:
  - social:
      cards_dir: path/to/folder

Dependencies¶

Two Python libraries must be installed alongside Material for MkDocs to generate the social preview images, both of which are based on Cairo Graphics – Pillow and CairoSVG:

pip install pillow cairosvg

Both libraries are built with native extensions which need to be installed as well. The Docker image comes with all dependencies pre-installed. If you don't want to use Docker, see the following section which explains how to install all dependencies on your system:

brew install cairo freetype libffi libjpeg libpng zlib

apt-get install libcairo2-dev libfreetype6-dev libffi-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libz-dev

yum install cairo-devel freetype-devel libffi-devel libjpeg-devel libpng-devel zlib-devel

zypper install cairo-devel freetype-devel libffi-devel libjpeg-devel libpng-devel zlib-devel

Caching recommended¶

The built-in social plugin automatically fetches the fonts you define in mkdocs.yml from Google Fonts, and uses them to render the text that is displayed on the social card. The font files and generated cards are both written to the .cache directory, which is used in subsequent builds to detect whether the social cards need to be regenerated. You might want to:

1. Ignore the .cache directory in your project, by adding it to .gitignore.

2. When building your site for publishing, use a build cache to save the .cache directory in between builds. Taking the example from the publishing guide, add the following lines:

   name: ci
     on:
       push:
         branches:
           - master
           - main
     jobs:
       deploy:
         runs-on: ubuntu-latest
         steps:
           - uses: actions/checkout@v2
           - uses: actions/setup-python@v2
             with:
               python-version: 3.x
           - uses: actions/cache@v2
             with:
               key: ${{ github.ref }}
               path: .cache
           - run: pip install mkdocs-material
           - run: mkdocs gh-deploy --force
   

Meta tags¶

The built-in social plugin automatically sets all necessary meta tags, equivalent to the following two customizations, which you can set manually when you don't want to use it:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block extrahead %}
  {% set title = config.site_name %}
  {% if page and page.meta and page.meta.title %}
    {% set title = title ~ " - " ~ page.meta.title %}
  {% elif page and page.title and not page.is_homepage %}
    {% set title = title ~ " - " ~ page.title %}
  {% endif %}
  <meta property="og:type" content="website" />
  <meta property="og:title" content="{{ title }}" />
  <meta property="og:description" content="{{ config.site_description }}" />
  <meta property="og:url" content="{{ page.canonical_url }}" />
  <meta property="og:image" content="<url>" />
  <meta property="og:image:type" content="image/png" />
  <meta property="og:image:width" content="1200" />
  <meta property="og:image:height" content="630" />
{% endblock %}

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block extrahead %}
  {% set title = config.site_name %}
  {% if page and page.meta and page.meta.title %}
    {% set title = title ~ " - " ~ page.meta.title %}
  {% elif page and page.title and not page.is_homepage %}
    {% set title = title ~ " - " ~ page.title %}
  {% endif %}
  <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
  <meta name="twitter:title" content="{{ title }}" />
  <meta name="twitter:description" content="{{ config.site_description }}" />
  <meta name="twitter:image" content="<url>" />
{% endblock %}

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.

• Changing the title
• Changing the description