Website sidebar auto generation fails for new files created by pre-render script

[georgestagg]

Bug description

With the following setup,

index.qmd:

Example Website

create.sh:

#!/bin/sh
mkdir -p example
echo "hello" > example/hello.qmd

_quarto.yml:

project:
  type: website
  pre-render: sh create.sh

website:
  title: Example Website
  sidebar:
    title: "Example Sidebar"
    contents:
      - index.qmd
      - auto: "example"

I see the following error when running QUARTO_PRINT_STACK=true quarto render,

ERROR: TypeError: Cannot convert undefined or null to object

TypeError: Cannot convert undefined or null to object
    at Function.keys (<anonymous>)
    at findIndexFile (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:91210:19)
    at nodesToEntries (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:91187:36)
    at sidebarItemsFromAuto (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:91115:31)
    at expandAutoSidebarItems (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:91037:37)
    at resolveSidebarItems (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:91660:32)
    at sidebarEjsData (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:91651:11)
    at sidebarsEjsData (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:91635:32)
    at initWebsiteNavigation (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:91273:37)
    at Object.preRender (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:95841:15)

Re-running the command then works OK, presumably because the example directory and hello.qmd file now exist before running quarto render. I would expect that Quarto would be able to find and render new files created by the pre-render script.

I note that when not using auto with a subdirectory there is no error thrown, however the new file is simply missing from the sidebar.

Extra Info

• macOS Ventura (13.0.1, arm64)
• quarto-cli v1.2.280 & v1.3.56

Checklist

• Please include a minimal, fully reproducible example in a single .qmd file? Please provide the whole file rather than the snippet you believe is causing the issue.
• Please format your issue so it is easier for us to read the bug report.
• Please document the RStudio IDE version you're running (if applicable), by providing the value displayed in the "About RStudio" main menu dialog?
• Please document the operating system you're running. If on Linux, please provide the specific distribution.

[josedusol]

@georgestagg Can you confirm pre-render does actually do anything?

Maybe related, but in mi case I have the problem that pre-render and post-render are ignored by quarto with any kind of script or inline shell command. In fact, i can fill those attributes with garbage and there will be no error.

[georgestagg]

Yes, pre-render does run and the new files are created OK, they just aren't recognised by Quarto.

[dragonstyle]

Thanks for reporting this, I can confirm it is an issue. The root cause is that we are computing a list of project inputs very early in the process of rendering the project (before the pre-render script has been run) and then we are filtering those inputs to generate the sidebar. Since the example folder shows up after the list of inputs has been computed, it isn't included in the list that is filtered.

This is a sufficiently complicated issue to resolve that I'm going to shift this to 1.4 as I think it is very risky for us to be tackling at this point in the 1.3 release.

[dragonstyle]

Need to move back to 1.5 as this will be a major change since we will need to re-compute inputs after the pre-render script (including doing any resolving that happened prior to the recompilation of the inputs).

[dragonstyle]

This should be fixed in Quarto 1.5 pre-release builds.