Instructions for an Easy Quarto Website

Just a list of instructions for building a quarto website with netlify, no GitHub, no CSS, nothing too technical.

Author

Zane Billings

Published

July 13, 2024

This checklist is 100% adapted from a much better blog post by Jadey Ryan. This is a condensed version that is designed to print on ~1 (maybe front/back) letter sized page.

Steps for making a Quarto website with Netlify.

  1. Install R and RStudio, update Quarto.
    1. R download link: https://cran.r-project.org/.
    2. RStudio download link: https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/.
    3. Quarto download link: https://quarto.org/docs/get-started/.
  2. Open RStudio, and use the dialog menu to create a new project in a new directory. Choose the “Quarto Website” project type. Optionally, check the “use visual editor” option.
  3. (Optional) render the website for the first time.
  4. Edit the home page (index.qmd). Specify the title and homepage contents.
  5. Edit the about page (about.qmd), using a template from the quarto docs. Add an image if you have one.
  6. Add a new page called “Projects” along with a directory, and set it up as a listing page.
  7. Add a new test project to the listing.
  8. Edit the listing _metadata.yml so that code pages get frozen.
  9. Update _quarto.yml to show the listing page, also talk about updating the website theme. See themes here.
  10. Make sure everything renders.
  11. Create an account on netlify if you don’t have one, then create a new netlify site. Upload the entire _site folder to Netlify.
  12. In site configuration, set up the site name. You can also add a custom domain name here if you want to pay for one.
  13. Whenever you want to update your website, simply render it again, and upload the _site folder to your website.

Reuse

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{billings2024,
  author = {Billings, Zane},
  title = {Instructions for an {Easy} {Quarto} {Website}},
  date = {2024-07-13},
  url = {https://wzbillings.com/posts/2024-07-13-Quarto-Website-Checklist},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Billings, Zane. 2024. “Instructions for an Easy Quarto Website.” July 13, 2024. https://wzbillings.com/posts/2024-07-13-Quarto-Website-Checklist.