Documentation and examples for Bootstrap’s powerful, responsive navigation header, the navbar. Includes support for branding, navigation, collapse plugin, and more.

Here’s what you need to know before getting started with the navbar:

Navbars come with built-in support for a handful of sub-components. Choose from the following as needed:

Here’s an example of all the sub-components included in a responsive light-themed navbar that automatically collapses at the lg (large) breakpoint.

This example uses color (bg-light) and spacing (my-2, my-lg-0, mr-sm-0, my-sm-0) utility classes.

The .navbar-brand can be applied to most elements, but an anchor works best, as some elements might require utility classes or custom styles.

Adding images to the .navbar-brand will likely always require custom styles or utilities to properly size. Here are some examples to demonstrate.

Navbar navigation links build on our .nav options with their own modifier class and require the use of toggler classes for proper responsive styling. Navigation in navbars will also grow to occupy as much horizontal space as possible to keep your navbar contents securely aligned.

Active states—with .active—to indicate the current page can be applied directly to .nav-links or their immediate parent .nav-items.

And because we use classes for our navs, you can avoid the list-based approach entirely if you like.

You can also use dropdowns in your navbar. Dropdown menus require a wrapping element for positioning, so be sure to use separate and nested elements for .nav-item and .nav-link as shown below.

Place various form controls and components within a navbar with .form-inline.

Immediate child elements of .navbar use flex layout and will default to justify-content: space-between. Use additional flex utilities as needed to adjust this behavior.

Input groups work, too:

Various buttons are supported as part of these navbar forms, too. This is also a great reminder that vertical alignment utilities can be used to align different sized elements.

Navbars may contain bits of text with the help of .navbar-text. This class adjusts vertical alignment and horizontal spacing for strings of text.

Mix and match with other components and utilities as needed.

Theming the navbar has never been easier thanks to the combination of theming classes and background-color utilities. Choose from .navbar-light for use with light background colors, or .navbar-dark for dark background colors. Then, customize with .bg-* utilities.

Although it’s not required, you can wrap a navbar in a .container to center it on a page. Or you can add a container inside the .navbar to only center the contents of a fixed or static top navbar.

When the container is within your navbar, its horizontal padding is removed at breakpoints lower than your specified .navbar-expand{-sm|-md|-lg|-xl} class. This ensures we’re not doubling up on padding unnecessarily on lower viewports when your navbar is collapsed.

Use our position utilities to place navbars in non-static positions. Choose from fixed to the top, fixed to the bottom, or stickied to the top (scrolls with the page until it reaches the top, then stays there). Fixed navbars use position: fixed, meaning they’re pulled from the normal flow of the DOM and may require custom CSS (e.g., padding-top on the ) to prevent overlap with other elements.

Also note that .sticky-top uses position: sticky, which isn’t fully supported in every browser.

Add .navbar-nav-scroll to a .navbar-collapse (or other navbar sub-component) to enable vertical scrolling within the toggleable contents of a collapsed navbar. By default, scrolling kicks in at 75vh (or 75% of the viewport height), but you can override that with inline or custom styles. At larger viewports when the navbar is expanded, content will appear as it does in a default navbar.

Please note that this behavior comes with a potential drawback of overflow—when setting overflow-y: auto (required to scroll the content here), overflow-x is the equivalent of auto, which will crop some horizontal content.

Here’s an example navbar using .navbar-nav-scroll with style="max-height: 100px;", with some extra margin utilities for optimum spacing.

Navbars can use .navbar-toggler, .navbar-collapse, and .navbar-expand{-sm|-md|-lg|-xl} classes to determine when their content collapses behind a button. In combination with other utilities, you can easily choose when to show or hide particular elements.

For navbars that never collapse, add the .navbar-expand class on the navbar. For navbars that always collapse, don’t add any .navbar-expand class.

Navbar togglers are left-aligned by default, but should they follow a sibling element like a .navbar-brand, they’ll automatically be aligned to the far right. Reversing your markup will reverse the placement of the toggler. Below are examples of different toggle styles.

With no .navbar-brand shown at the smallest breakpoint:

With a brand name shown on the left and toggler on the right:

With a toggler on the left and brand name on the right:

Sometimes you want to use the collapse plugin to trigger a container element for content that structurally sits outside of the .navbar . Because our plugin works on the id and data-target matching, that’s easily done!

When you do this, we recommend including additional JavaScript to move the focus programmatically to the container when it is opened. Otherwise, keyboard users and users of assistive technologies will likely have a hard time finding the newly revealed content - particularly if the container that was opened comes before the toggler in the document’s structure. We also recommend making sure that the toggler has the aria-controls attribute, pointing to the id of the content container. In theory, this allows assistive technology users to jump directly from the toggler to the container it controls–but support for this is currently quite patchy.