Routing

VitePress uses file-based routing, which means the generated HTML pages are mapped from the directory structure of the source Markdown files. For example, given the following directory structure:

.
├─ guide
│  ├─ getting-started.md
│  └─ index.md
├─ index.md
└─ prologue.md

The generated HTML pages will be:

index.md                  -->  /index.html (accessible as /)
prologue.md               -->  /prologue.html
guide/index.md            -->  /guide/index.html (accessible as /guide/)
guide/getting-started.md  -->  /guide/getting-started.html

The resulting HTML can be hosted on any web server that can serve static files.

There are two important concepts in the file structure of a VitePress project: the project root and the source directory.

Project root is where VitePress will try to look for the .vitepress special directory. The .vitepress directory is a reserved location for VitePress' config file, dev server cache, build output, and optional theme customization code.

When you run vitepress dev or vitepress build from the command line, VitePress will use the current working directory as project root. To specify a sub-directory as root, you will need to pass the relative path to the command. For example, if your VitePress project is located in ./docs, you should run vitepress dev docs:

.
├─ docs                    # project root
│  ├─ .vitepress           # config dir
│  ├─ getting-started.md
│  └─ index.md
└─ ...

vitepress dev docs

This is going to result in the following source-to-HTML mapping:

docs/index.md            -->  /index.html (accessible as /)
docs/getting-started.md  -->  /getting-started.html

Source directory is where your Markdown source files live. By default, it is the same as the project root. However, you can configure it via the srcDir config option.

The srcDir option is resolved relative to project root. For example, with srcDir: 'src', your file structure will look like this:

.                          # project root
├─ .vitepress              # config dir
└─ src                     # source dir
   ├─ getting-started.md
   └─ index.md

The resulting source-to-HTML mapping:

src/index.md            -->  /index.html (accessible as /)
src/getting-started.md  -->  /getting-started.html

You can use both absolute and relative paths when linking between pages. Note that although both .md and .html extensions will work, the best practice is to omit file extensions so that VitePress can generate the final URLs based on your config.

<!-- Do -->
[Getting Started](./getting-started)
[Getting Started](../guide/getting-started)

<!-- Don't -->
[Getting Started](./getting-started.md)
[Getting Started](./getting-started.html)

Learn more about linking to assets such images in Asset Handling.

If you want to link to a page in your site that is not generated by VitePress, you'll either need to use the full URL (opens in a new tab) or explicitly specify the target:

Input

[Link to pure.html](/pure.html){target="_self"}

Output

Link to pure.html

By default, VitePress resolves inbound links to URLs ending with .html. However, some users may prefer "Clean URLs" without the .html extension - for example, example.com/path instead of example.com/path.html.

Some servers or hosting platforms (for example Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages) provide the ability to map a URL like /foo to /foo.html if it exists, without a redirect:

• Netlify and GitHub Pages support this by default.
• Vercel requires enabling the cleanUrls option in vercel.json.

If this feature is available to you, you can then also enable VitePress' own cleanUrls config option so that:

• Inbound links between pages are generated without the .html extension.
• If current path ends with .html, the router will perform a client-side redirect to the extension-less path.

If, however, you cannot configure your server with such support, you will have to manually resort to the following directory structure:

.
├─ getting-started
│  └─ index.md
├─ installation
│  └─ index.md
└─ index.md

You can customize the mapping between the source directory structure and the generated pages. It's useful when you have a complex project structure. For example, let's say you have a monorepo with multiple packages, and would like to place documentations along with the source files like this:

.
└─ packages
   ├─ pkg-a
   │  └─ src
   │     ├─ foo.md
   │     └─ index.md
   └─ pkg-b
      └─ src
         ├─ bar.md
         └─ index.md

And you want the VitePress pages to be generated like this:

packages/pkg-a/src/index.md  -->  /pkg-a/index.html
packages/pkg-a/src/foo.md    -->  /pkg-a/foo.html
packages/pkg-b/src/index.md  -->  /pkg-b/index.html
packages/pkg-b/src/bar.md    -->  /pkg-b/bar.html

You can achieve this by configuring the rewrites option like this:

export default {
  rewrites: {
    'packages/pkg-a/src/index.md': 'pkg-a/index.md',
    'packages/pkg-a/src/foo.md': 'pkg-a/foo.md',
    'packages/pkg-b/src/index.md': 'pkg-b/index.md',
    'packages/pkg-b/src/bar.md': 'pkg-b/bar.md'
  }
}

The rewrites option also supports dynamic route parameters. In the above example, it would be verbose to list all the paths if you have many packages. Given that they all have the same file structure, you can simplify the config like this:

export default {
  rewrites: {
    'packages/:pkg/src/:slug*': ':pkg/:slug*'
  }
}

The rewrite paths are compiled using the path-to-regexp package - consult its documentation for more advanced syntax.

rewrites can also be a function that receives the original path and returns the new path:

export default {
  rewrites(id) {
    return id.replace(/^packages\/([^/]+)\/src\//, '$1/')
  }
}

You can generate many pages using a single Markdown file and dynamic data. For example, you can create a packages/[pkg].md file that generates a corresponding page for every package in a project. Here, the [pkg] segment is a route parameter that differentiates each page from the others.

Since VitePress is a static site generator, the possible page paths must be determined at build time. Therefore, a dynamic route page must be accompanied by a paths loader file. For packages/[pkg].md, we will need packages/[pkg].paths.js (.ts is also supported):

.
└─ packages
   ├─ [pkg].md         # route template
   └─ [pkg].paths.js   # route paths loader

The paths loader should provide an object with a paths method as its default export. The paths method should return an array of objects with a params property. Each of these objects will generate a corresponding page.

Given the following paths array:

// packages/[pkg].paths.js
export default {
  paths() {
    return [
      { params: { pkg: 'foo' }},
      { params: { pkg: 'bar' }}
    ]
  }
}

The generated HTML pages will be:

.
└─ packages
   ├─ foo.html
   └─ bar.html

If you are using TypeScript, you can wrap the loader with defineRoutes from vitepress to get type hints for route hooks such as paths, watch, and transformPageData:

// packages/[pkg].paths.ts
import { defineRoutes } from 'vitepress'

export default defineRoutes({
  watch: ['../data/**/*.json'],
  async paths() {
    return [
      { params: { pkg: 'foo' } },
      { params: { pkg: 'bar' } }
    ]
  },
  async transformPageData(pageData) {
    pageData.title = `${pageData.title} · Packages`
  }
})

defineRoutes is optional, but recommended when authoring .paths.ts files.

A dynamic route can contain multiple params:

File Structure

.
└─ packages
   ├─ [pkg]-[version].md
   └─ [pkg]-[version].paths.js

Paths Loader

export default {
  paths: () => [
    { params: { pkg: 'foo', version: '1.0.0' }},
    { params: { pkg: 'foo', version: '2.0.0' }},
    { params: { pkg: 'bar', version: '1.0.0' }},
    { params: { pkg: 'bar', version: '2.0.0' }}
  ]
}

Output

.
└─ packages
   ├─ foo-1.0.0.html
   ├─ foo-2.0.0.html
   ├─ bar-1.0.0.html
   └─ bar-2.0.0.html

The paths loader module is run in Node.js and only executed during build time. You can dynamically generate the paths array using any data, either local or remote.

Generating paths from local files:

import fs from 'node:fs'

export default {
  paths() {
    return fs
      .readdirSync('packages')
      .map((pkg) => {
        return { params: { pkg }}
      })
  }
}

Generating paths from remote data:

export default {
  async paths() {
    const pkgs = await (await fetch('https://my-api.com/packages')).json()

    return pkgs.map((pkg) => {
      return {
        params: {
          pkg: pkg.name,
          version: pkg.version
        }
      }
    })
  }
}

When generating page content from templates or external data sources, you can use the watch option to automatically rebuild pages when those files change during development:

// posts/[slug].paths.js
import fs from 'node:fs'
import { renderTemplate } from './templates/renderer.js'

export default {
  // Watch for changes to template files and data sources
  watch: [
    './templates/**/*.njk',     // Template files
    '../data/**/*.json'         // Data files
  ],

  paths(watchedFiles) {
    // watchedFiles will be an array of absolute paths of the matched files
    // Read data files to generate routes
    const dataFiles = watchedFiles.filter(file => file.endsWith('.json'))

    return dataFiles.map(file => {
      const data = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(file, 'utf-8'))

      return {
        params: { slug: data.slug },
        content: renderTemplate(data)  // Use template to generate content
      }
    })
  }
}

The watch option works the same way as in data loaders:

• Accepts glob patterns to match files
• Patterns are relative to the .paths.js file itself
• Changes to watched files trigger page regeneration and HMR during development
• In production builds, all pages are generated once regardless of watch configuration

You can use the params to pass additional data to each page. The Markdown route file can access the current page params in Vue expressions via the $params global property:

- package name: {{ $params.pkg }}
- version: {{ $params.version }}

You can also access the current page's params via the useData runtime API. This is available in both Markdown files and Vue components:

<script setup>
import { useData } from 'vitepress'

// params is a Vue ref
const { params } = useData()

console.log(params.value)
</script>

Params passed to the page will be serialized in the client JavaScript payload, so you should avoid passing heavy data in params, for example raw Markdown or HTML content fetched from a remote CMS.

Instead, you can pass such content to each page using the content property on each path object:

export default {
  async paths() {
    const posts = await (await fetch('https://my-cms.com/blog-posts')).json()

    return posts.map((post) => {
      return {
        params: { id: post.id },
        content: post.content // raw Markdown or HTML
      }
    })
  }
}

Then, use the following special syntax to render the content as part of the Markdown file itself:

<!-- @content -->