Enabling adaptive content

Choose an authentication method to pass user data to GitBook.

To start customizing your documentation experience for your readers, you'll need to enable adaptive content and decide how your visitor data is passed to GitBook. This lets your site's content dynamically adapt based on who's viewing it.

Enable adaptive content

Before you’re able to pass user data to GitBook, you’ll need to configure your site to use adaptive content.

Head to your site’s settings, and enable “Adaptive content” from your site’s audience settings. Once enabled, you’ll get a generated “Visitor token signing key”, which you’ll need in order to continue the adaptive content setup.

Enable adaptive content

Set your adaptive schema

After enabling adaptive content, you’ll need to define a schema for the types of claims you expect GitBook to receive when a user visits your site.

The adaptive content schema should reflect how these claims are structured when sent to GitBook.

For example, if you expect a visitor to potentially be a beta user in your product, you would set an adaptive schema similar to:

{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "isBetaUser": {
      "type": "boolean",
      "description": "Whether the visitor is a Beta user."
    },
  },
  "additionalProperties": false
}

This will also help you use autocomplete when configuring your claims in the condition editor.

Adaptive schemas only support objects, booleans, and strings.

Set an unsigned claim

If you intend to work with unsigned claims, you will need to declare the claims you are expecting in the schema under an “unsigned” prop alongside your signed claims.

{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "isBetaUser": {
      "type": "boolean",
      "description": "Whether the visitor is a Beta user."
    },
    // Add unsigned claims
    "unsigned": {
      "type": "object",
      "description": "Unsigned claims of the site visitor.",
      "properties": {
        "language": {
          "type": "string",
          "description": "The language of the visitor",
          "enum": [
            "en",
            "fr",
            "it"
          ]
        }
      },
      "additionalProperties": false
    }
  }
  "additionalProperties": false
}

Pass visitor data to GitBook

GitBook provides different ways to pass visitor data to adapt your site's content. After defining your schema, you’ll need to decide how you want to pass your visitor data to GitBook.

Cookies

Pass visitor data into your docs through a public or signed cookie.

URL

Pass visitor data into your docs through URL query parameters.

Feature flags

Pass visitor data into your docs through a feature flag provider.

Authenticated access

Pass visitor data into your docs through an authentication provider.