A Github Action to Render Quarto Documents

This repository stores the quarto-render GitHub Action for use with Quarto projects. This action will call quarto render on the root directory of the repo. It also has example workflows for some common uses centered around web publishing.

Examples

Rendering a static quarto site and pushing to gh-pages branch

If your quarto project has freeze: true, you can use this Github action to render your documents and publish your workflow to Github pages by using something like the following workflow:

# .github/workflows/render-and-publish.yaml
name: Render and deploy Quarto files
on:
  push:
  pull_request:

jobs:
  quarto-render-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: "Install Quarto and render"
        uses: pommevilla/quarto-render@main

      - name: "Deploy to gh-pages"
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./_site

• See here for an example page that runs this workflow with freeze: true that has both Python and R code.
• Read more about using freeze in your Quarto project here.

Installing Python or R dependencies before using quarto-render and publishing results to the gh-pages branch.

You can use quarto-render with Quarto projects that aren't frozen by first reinstalling the packages used by your documents before rendering.

• For R libraries, use renv to capture dependencies for your RMarkdown code and use it to restore your environment in your workflow.
  • Example job steps are here.
  • Read more about renv at the package site.
• Use pip freeze > requirements.txt to capture Python package requirements. You can then restore your environment via pip install -r requirements.txt
  • Note that if you are on a Windows machine and running a Github workflow on a non-Windows image, then the above command should be modified to pip freeze | grep -iv "win" > requirements.txt to avoid capturing Windows-specific pacakges in your requirements.txt. These packages will cause errors when attempting installation on non-Windows machine.

Below is the workflow used in an example repository to restore the Python and R dependencies required for its documents before rendering them with the quarto-render Github action and pushing them to the gh-pages branch with action-gh-pages (link).

# .github/workflows/render-and-publish.yaml
name: Render and deploy Quarto files
on:
  push:
  pull_request:

jobs:
  quarto-render-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      RENV_PATHS_ROOT: ~/.local/share/renv
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - uses: actions/setup-python@v2

      - name: "Install Python deps"
        run: |
          pip install -r requirements.txt

      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v1

      - name: "Install curl for Bioconductor"
        run: |
          sudo apt -y install libcurl4-openssl-dev

      - name: "Install R Packages: Cache packages"
        uses: actions/cache@v1
        with:
          path: ${{ env.RENV_PATHS_ROOT }}
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-renv-${{ hashFiles('**/renv.lock') }}
          restore-keys: |
            ${{ runner.os }}-renv-

      - name: "Install R Packages: Restore packages"
        shell: Rscript {0}
        run: |
          if (!requireNamespace("renv", quietly = TRUE)) install.packages("renv")
          renv::restore()

      - name: "Install Quarto and render"
        uses: pommevilla/quarto-render@main

      - name: "Deploy to gh-pages"
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./_site

• See here for an example repository that implements this workflow.
• While it is possible to use quarto-render in this way, you'll have a much better experience using freeze. See here for some more discussion.