How to change width of a Sidenav in Angular Material Design? - css

Question

No matter what screen size I use, the Sidenav is always the same size. I tried adding attributes such as
- flex
- flex="85" (to get 85% of its container)
Can't seem to find a good approach.

Answer 1

In angular material, md-sidenav has these attributes:
width: 304px;
min-width: 304px;
That's why the width will be fixed at 304 px no matter what device you use.
So if you want to change your sidenav width you'll have to change the css a bit.
If you're fine with supporting only modern browsers, you can change it to a vw measure (1/100th of the viewport width) and add it to a separate css file. The code will look something like this:
md-sidenav,
md-sidenav.md-locked-open,
md-sidenav.md-closed.md-locked-open-add-active {
min-width: 200px !important;
width: 85vw !important;
max-width: 400px !important;
}
Here's a plunker: http://plnkr.co/edit/cXfJzxsAFXA3Lh4TiWUk?p=preview

Answer 2

The answer submitted by user3587412 allowed me to change the width but I was having the same problem as Craig Shearer with it killing the animation. So I tried a few different things and came up with this.
md-sidenav.md-locked-open {
width: 250px;
min-width: 250px;
max-width: 250px;
}
I'm not sure if that is the proper way but it seemed to work for me.

Answer 3

Thanks to user3587412 I could find easily the required styles.
To get the md-sidenav to adjust to a flex parent just override
md-sidenav,
md-sidenav.md-locked-open,
md-sidenav.md-closed.md-locked-open-add-active {
min-width: 0px !important;
width: auto !important;
max-width: none !important;
}

Answer 4

After trying different CSS in this thread I end up with :
md-sidenav,
md-sidenav.md-locked-open-add-active,
md-sidenav.md-closed.md-locked-open-add-active,
md-sidenav.md-locked-open {
width: 200px;
min-width: 200px;
max-width: 200px;
}
I'm currently on angular-material 1.0.8 and tested with Chrome 50 only.
With this CSS what works for me :
Animation close and open OK
When locked OK
When not locked OK

Answer 5

In case anyone comes here using the latest mat-sidenav, you can explicitly set the width on the the element.
mat-sidenav {
width: 200px;
}
The docs caution against using percentage based sizes.
https://material.angular.io/components/sidenav/overview#setting-the-sidenavs-size

Answer 6

Here's a somewhat "jank" solution, but it doesn't mess with the animations at all. The sidenav automatically resizes itself in order of the items inside it to fit perfectly. As such, you can just add a span with the width of your choice to the mat-drawer to set a minimum size. Note that this only works to set a minimum width, and not a maximum width.
<span style="height: 0px; width: 200px; display: inline-block;"></span>

Answer 7

I came across this issue, as well -- even though the 304px width is plenty, I had a card in the content area to the right that was squeezing the sidenav. So, using the flex grid I was able to add <md-sidenav flex="15" class="md-sidenav-left ... to get the width I wanted without overriding CSS. It sounds like this didn't work for you, so maybe it has to do with the layout options in your design...