I'm also seeing this. Originally my site consisted of two pages: an index and a "what's new". The index had a single hidden TOC with maxdepth 1. No customizations were done to the theme. No matter what I do I can't get rid of the left sidebar nor can I get it to display anything except "Section Navigation". Even if I add a third page nothing changes. I've tried unhiding the TOC. I've tried numbering the TOC. Nothing changes this from being just "Section Navigation".

@djhoese and @Charlie-XIAO can you please provide

• version of theme you're using
• link to repo
• link to built site

Of course, sorry. Here's the relevant packages:

$ mamba list sphinx
# packages in environment at /home/davidh/miniconda3/envs/geosphere_api_py311:
#
# Name                    Version                   Build  Channel
pydata-sphinx-theme       0.15.2             pyhd8ed1ab_0    conda-forge
sphinx                    7.2.6              pyhd8ed1ab_0    conda-forge
sphinxcontrib-applehelp   1.0.7              pyhd8ed1ab_0    conda-forge
sphinxcontrib-devhelp     1.0.5              pyhd8ed1ab_0    conda-forge
sphinxcontrib-htmlhelp    2.0.4              pyhd8ed1ab_0    conda-forge
sphinxcontrib-jsmath      1.0.1              pyhd8ed1ab_0    conda-forge
sphinxcontrib-qthelp      1.0.6              pyhd8ed1ab_0    conda-forge
sphinxcontrib-serializinghtml 1.1.9              pyhd8ed1ab_0    conda-forge

Docs source: https://gitlab.ssec.wisc.edu/cspp_geo/geosphere/geosphere-docs

Published site: https://geosphere.ssec.wisc.edu/docs/

Primary problem page (the only non-index page in my site): https://geosphere.ssec.wisc.edu/docs/whats-new.html

Edit: The source repository includes a Dockerfile that does all the dependency installs and building of the site.

@drammock Sorry for the late reply. The one I'm working on is the scikit-learn homepage, see scikit-learn/scikit-learn#28132. It is a bit too large, so I crafted a minimal reproducible example instead. The version is pydata-sphinx-theme==0.15.2.

• Repo: https://github.com/Charlie-XIAO/pst-primary-sidebar-bug
• Deployed website: https://charlie-xiao.github.io/pst-primary-sidebar-bug/
• Buggy page: https://charlie-xiao.github.io/pst-primary-sidebar-bug/page.html

I think the cause is here:

This assumption does not seem to be correct.

I opened #1682 to propose a fix. Hopefully it can be included in 0.15.3 otherwise I would have to pin 0.14.x in scikit-learn.

That seems like valid logic to me unless I'm misunderstanding. In my case I have a parent TOC and the page I'm on could have a side bar, but the side bar is empty.

@djhoese Sorry I'm a bit confused now. From what I see you have on the index page

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1
   :hidden:

   whats-new

and no toctree on the whats-new page, so I'm thinking there should indeed be nothing in the primary sidebar of the whats-new page, and the primary sidebar should not show up. Is that not what you mean? If so what do you expect to see in the primary sidebar?

In my case I have a parent TOC

But index is your root_doc so things (in your case whats-new) are showing in the top navbar I think, if I'm not misunderstanding how things should work.

@djhoese using your docker image, I can make the sidebar disappear on your whats-new page by adding this to conf.py:

html_sidebars = {
    'whats-new': []
}

It is supposed to happen automatically when the sidebar elements are all empty, but for some buggy reason your whats-new page is ending up with a single empty TOC element:

<div class="bd-toc-item navbar-nav"></div>

If on the contrary you were expecting a TOC to actually appear there (below the "section navigation" heading) then there's a misunderstanding about the theme: your homepage is the site's root, and the whats-new page is the (only) first-level page; the left sidebar TOC by default would show any pages below that first-level page (of which there are none). The first-level pages only show up (by default) in the top navbar.

@Charlie-XIAO I haven't had time to look at your site yet, but will try to do so soon.

Sorry I'm a bit confused now

Is that not what you mean? If so what do you expect to see in the primary sidebar?

Honestly, I don't know. I think my thinking for my last comment was "if it is going to show the sidebar, then it must be considering the hidden TOC, so in that case there should be something shown". But yeah, if it isn't supposed to do anything with a hidden TOC as far as the sidebar goes then it makes sense that it is including the sidebar erroneously but the rest of the logic is correctly not finding anything to put in the sidebar (because it is hidden).

@drammock Thanks. All my googling kept leading to the navigation and sidebars page here:

https://pydata-sphinx-theme.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user_guide/navigation.html

which doesn't mention the import html_sidebars configuration. I wouldn't have commented and looked through github issues if I would have just found this section from my searches:

https://pydata-sphinx-theme.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user_guide/layout.html#primary-sidebar-left

Thanks everyone.

I haven't had time to look at your site yet, but will try to do so soon.

No hurries @drammock. Except from the site that linked, in #1682 I further provided a minimal reproducible site and corresponding tests, if those may help.