mkdocs-backlinks-section-plugin

MkDocs Backlinks Section Plugin

Adds a backlinks section that lists every page linking to the current page.

The added backlinks section looks like this, but you can also customize the title and the text show above the list:

Comparision to similar plugins

I wrote my plugin after trying some existing plugins and not being 100% happy with them. But depending on your intended use case, they may be a better fit.

mkdocs-backlinks

My plugin is similar in concept to mkdocs-backlinks, but I wanted a plugin that works out of the box.

With mkdocs-backlinks you can specify exactly where and how you want to have your backlinks shown, but at the cost of having to potentially alter your template files.

With my plugin you just need to add the plugin to your mkdocs.yml, but the backlinks can only be added as a section at the bottom of each page.

mkdocs-publisher

mkdocs-publisher is a bundle of plugins. The pub-obsidian also has a backlinks feature.

While my plugin does a single job and has minimal dependencies, mkdocs-publisher offers many more features but at the cost of many more dependencies.

Installation

You can install it with pip:

pip install mkdocs-backlinks-section-plugin

Usage

Add the plugin to your mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
- search
- backlinks_section

Configuration

Text

You can customize the text inserted by the plugin with the configuration values below:

Option	Type	Default value
title	string	Backlinks
description	string	The following pages link to this page:
description_no_links	string	No other pages link to this page.

So for example if you would want the text to be in German, you could do this in your mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
- search
- backlinks_section:
    title: Rückverweise
    description: "Die folgenden Seiten referenzieren die aktuelle Seite:"
    description_no_links: Es gibt keine Verweise auf diese Seite.

Ignore pages

You can ignore source and destination pages for the backlink section. The values are interpreted as glob-like patterns, wich are matched against the paths of the Markdown source files.

Option	Type	Default value
ignore_links_from	list of strings	[]
ignore_links_to	list of strings	[]

For example you may have a page listing all tags (and thus linking to almost all pages) and want to prevent every page having a backlink to it:

plugins:
- search
- backlinks_section:
    ignore_links_from:
    - path/with/globs/**/to/tags.md

If you do not want a backlinks section on some pages, you can disable it with the ignore_links_to option:

plugins:
- search
- backlinks_section:
    ignore_links_to:
    - path/with/globs/**/to/files-without-backlink-section-*.md
    - index.md

Hide section

Option	Type	Default value
add_to_toc	boolean	true
hide_if_empty	boolean	false

If you do not want a backlinks section to be added to the table of contents of seach page, you can set the add_to_toc parameter to false:

plugins:
- search
- backlinks_section:
    add_to_toc: false

If you want to hide the backlinks section from pages which have no backlinks, you can set the hide_if_empty attribute to true. Please note that in the current implementation this also requires always hiding the section title (even if the section exists) from the table of contents. To suppress the warning about this it is recommended to explicitly set add_to_toc to false too:

plugins:
- search
- backlinks_section:
    add_to_toc: false
    hide_if_empty: true

Notable changes

Version 0.0.5

• Ignore empty link tags created by listings with line numbers (linenums="1")
• In warning messages show which file caused the warning

Version 0.0.4

• Added add_to_toc option, which controls whether to add the backlinks section to the table of contents.
• Added hide_if_empty option, which will hide the backlinks section, if no backlinks exist. This requires add_to_toc to be false, otherwise the table of contents would point to a potentially non-existent section.

Version 0.0.3

• Fixed crash with Python <= 3.12

Version 0.0.2

• Added ignore_links_from and ignore_links_to configuration options

Version 0.0.1

• Initial version