How to deal with git conflicts when trying to automate Quarto blog postings on multiple machines?

[smach]

Description

I have a Quarto blog that I publish via GitHub and Netlify. A version of the repo on my Linux cloud server runs a cron job that updates events listings daily, pushes to GitHub, and publishes. I use another version of the repo on my local machine to write and publish my blog posts, pulling from the repo first to make sure all my _site files like the site map and search are up to date.

The problem comes if I want to work on a post locally that I want to render/preview but not publish for a few days, such as my "Election Results" with fake data I don't want to publish until next week with real data. Even if I set draft: true, if I render, files in _site seem to get changed, and then I end up with merge conflicts if I try to keep up to date with the repo. So I end up just doing hard resets which blows away anything else I might want to keep.

Any suggestions on how to handle this? Is there something else I can do to keep my rendering of a draft post from changing files in my _site directory? Thank you.

[mcanouil]

This is more of a Git question than Quarto. Regarding draft, the behaviour is as expected/documented (https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-drafts.html).

There are many ways you can "solve" your issue git restore ..., git push --force ..., git pull ..., git checkout ... -- ....

git fetch
git pull
git checkout --ours _site/
git add _site/
git commit

or set a .gitattributes with a merge strategy (https://git-scm.com/docs/merge-config)

# 1. Create .gitattributes file
echo "_site/* merge=ours" >> .gitattributes

# 2. Define the merge strategy
git config merge.ours.driver true

# 3. Commit the .gitattributes file
git add .gitattributes
git commit -m "Set merge strategy for _site directory"

I must admit I did not understand your workflow, especially why you would want to commit/push _site before you actually update your branch (git fetch / git pull).
If your CI/CD is doing rendering, hopefully it's done only on push or on some more rare events, thus updating first before doing anything should be your workflow as it ensure you'll have no conflicts at all in the first place.

[smach]

Thanks for the response. Do you know what happens if I want to work on my Election Results post over several weeks while also adding additional posts? This is a very common workflow for a website that publishes both features and timely news. What if it's Monday and I work on my Election Results draft, tweak it, render locally, and _site files change? Then it's Tuesday and I post a short item by working on it locally, rendering, _site files change again, and I pushing to git remote? Will quarto know not to include the draft _site content in ANY of the _site files and only the live content for things like search results, RSS, sitemap?

[mcanouil]

I see, then you would need some automatic update which starts to get a bit tricky.

Note that the conflict resolution approach I mentioned can target whatever you want, in the example I showed the top-level _site, but you can target any sub-directory or files.

Another approach would be to use render-target to fully exclude rendering of some of your posts or use _ prefix for your draft.

[smach]

Thank you.