Publish a Quarto project using GitHub Pages+GitHub Actions in 6 minutes (no need to render locally!)

[@koushik7604]

This is something I was looking for. Thanks a lot Melissa.

[@muhammetmelikkolgesiz9252]

Worked like a charm. Thank you for your clear instructions!

[@gooseberrylay]

I had some errors that mentioned something about a "lock file". The page with the yaml code (used in the video) says that you should run "quarto publish gh-pages", once, to be able to use github actions. I did that and got it to work. Thanks for the great video!

[@kyleGrealis]

What a fantastic explanation, Melissa! Great job and now I feel inspired enough to make my own :)

[@ggnot2]

Thanks, Kyle! You totally should -- send me a link if you end up making one, I'd be interested to check it out :)

This is really useful, now it's time to move from rmakrdown to Quarto. Great!

[@ggnot2]

Quarto is definitely worth the switch!

[@indemonic]

Excellent video Melissa! It was clear and effective. Do you know if there are some templates (or knowing examples) that a new user could use to start with his new Github page with Quarto? Thank you so much again!

[@Aaqib..]

😮excited to try it out, thanks

[@hoschie211]

That was amazing 🙂

[@ggnot2]

Thanks so much for watching!

[@user-rx8ex2fi8j]

Great video! Could you explain why you need to create a branch for creating a website? What will be the difference if you directly put the .yml in the master? Thanks

[@phdpablo2819]

Ok, but isn't recommended check if everthing its right localy before I started a lot of wrong commits?

[@samritpramanik2962]

Will it work for already published quarto website to some host other than github page (e.g. netlify) ??

[@ggnot2]

Hmm, I haven't tried with netlify. Jadey Ryan has a really great blog post though on using Netlify + Quarto + GitHub: jadeyryan.com/blog/2023-11-19_publish-quarto-website/

[@user-ng1rf5nv2d]

This was a great tutorial! I got my site up in no time. Question regarding your workflow following this initial set up: when I'm developing new code to publish, do I do it on the main or gh-pages branch or some other branch? And do I put the _project.yml file on both branches or just the main? Thank you.

[@user-ng1rf5nv2d]

(main)

[@ggnot2]

@@user-ng1rf5nv2d Great question! I'm sure there are many ways to make things work, but I've continued to only make changes to my main branch and it's updated the public-facing site no problem, so that's one workflow that works :)

[@gecarter53]

Great video! Who knew it could be this simple. Can you mention any limitations as compared to creating a Shiny website?

[@mikegaunt837]

Shiny can be overkill for many applications - you can get pretty good interactivity using plotly, leaflet, crosstalk, DT, reactable, etc without having to also develop additional Shiny specific code (observe, reactive, UI/Server mumbo jumbo) as you would with a Shiny application. In addition, making Quarto/RMarkdown/HTML documents are easy to develop (for reason given above) and can be turned into a Shiny document once features have been mostly put together or approved (as in by a client). These documents can be shared locally to anyone that has access to a browser to open up HTML files or can be hosted freely. TLDR; Shiny can be overkill for a lot of reasons.

[@radioncreation]

Hi Melissa, with this way of publishing I face the issue of not being able to publish code blocks. All github action jobs are failing any idea what is wrong? Sth missing in publish.yml?

[@radioncreation]

I mean code execution blocks not just simple code blocks. Simple code blocks are not formatted properly, and execution code blocks can not be deployed with the github action way of publishing.

[@datawithrama1211]

Hi Melissa! that was simple yet astonishing tutorials. Bu I have a question. In your publish.yml file, it is written that the branch is "main". However, your github pages settings, the branch is "gh-page". Can you give us an explanation for that? How can it be different? Thank you!

[@ggnot2]

That's a great question! I don't believe it's technically required, but more of a best practice since it's the standard / conventional way of doing things, which makes it easier for other people to use your code and understand your repo. Since it's the standard, it also is likely slightly easier since this is the default that you're going to see in most tutorials and templates. I don't think there's theoretically anything stopping you from manually editing the publish.yml file, though, and changing this default behaviour to publish the site from a different branch. With all that being said, I haven't actually tried that myself - this is just based on my best guess based on how CI/CD works on GitLab (which I have more experience with)

[@tomaszklimanek6662]

Great!!! Thank you! Do you have any experience in publishing quarto book or website on GitLab pages ? I saw your video with quarto presentation published on Gitlab pages but I guess in case of quarto book it would be not the same approach.

[@ggnot2]

I do, yes! The process for a quarto book using GitLab Pages is very similar to the process for revealjs. Really it would only change a line or two in the .gitlab-ci.yml file -- I'm pretty sure it's as easy as removing lines 7 and 8 from the file here: gitlab.com/melissavanbussel/example-slides/-/blob/main/.gitlab-ci.yml?ref_type=heads (If you end up trying it and that doesn't work, send me a link to the repo and I can take a look, or I can make a cloneable template)

[@tomaszklimanek6662]

It was that simple! 😄Thank you Melissa! I work for Statistics Poland and found your videos very inspiring. We are working on a kind of a guide on SDC methods and I prefer GitLab as it seems to give more possibilities to create webpages with access limited only to team members.

[@ggnot2]

@@tomaszklimanek6662 That's really cool! GitHub seems to be more commonly used, but I prefer the flexibility of GitLab as well :)