How to create a dropdown menu in Bootstrap ?

Last Updated : 06 Aug, 2021

A dropdown menu offers a list of alternatives when clicked or hovered on, which is a clean method of providing a list of alternatives as only one option is displayed initially onto the screen. Drop-down menus are used in almost all types of software nowadays to show sub-options of the option.

Step 1: To include this drop-down into your website by making use of bootstrap, you just need to include the following jQuery and bootstrap js libraries, as scripts in your HTML code.

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.12.0/jquery.min.js"></script> <script src="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>

Step 2: Include the following stylesheet in the head of the HTML document to give an appearance of a dropdown.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/css/bootstrap.min.css">

Step 3: And make sure to enclose the dropdown menu within the .dropdown class, the button or the main option within .btn btn-primary dropdown-toggle class, and the list of alternatives within the .dropdown-menu class as below.

<div class="dropdown">  
   <button class="btn btn-primary dropdown-toggle" 
           type="button" data-toggle="dropdown">
      Data Structures  
     <span class="caret"></span>
    </button>  
   <ul>  
     <li><a href="#">Array</a></li>  
     <li><a href="#">Stack</a></li>  
     <li><a href="#">Queue</a></li>  
   </ul>  
</div>

The class .caret is used to display the little upside-down triangle in the button as shown in the output.

Example:

HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

<head>

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href=
"https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/css/bootstrap.min.css">
    <script src=
"https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.12.0/jquery.min.js">
    </script>
    <script src=
"https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/js/bootstrap.min.js">
    </script>
    <style>
        .container {
            color: green;
        }
    </style>
</head>

<body>

    <div class="container">
        <h1>GeeksforGeeks</h1>
        <h2>Dropdowns</h2>
        <div class="dropdown">
            <button class="btn btn-primary dropdown-toggle"
                type="button" data-toggle="dropdown">
                Data Structures 
                <span class="caret"></span>
            </button>
            <ul class="dropdown-menu">
                <li><a href="#">Array</a></li>
                <li><a href="#">String</a></li>
                <li><a href="#">Stack</a></li>
                <li><a href="#">Queue</a></li>
                <li><a href="#">Map</a></li>
                <li><a href="#">Tree</a></li>
            </ul>
        </div>
    </div>
</body>

</html>

Output: As you can see in the output, the dropdown button is created with the name Data Structures, and on clicking it, you are provided with a list of options as you can see above.