intro_quarto

Author

Jessica Bolin

Published

March 18, 2025

QuartoPub

I use Quarto Pub for keeping a publicly available legacy of tutorial notes, websites and other documents I create in R. Here’s a guide on how to use it.

1. Sign up

https://quartopub.com/sign-up

You can either link it to your Github account if you already have one, or, input a email & password combination. If the latter, you’ll need to input a username. Once you’ve done that, you’re good to go.

2. Create a Quarto document in RStudio

Open RStudio. Create a new project, and click Quarto Project, if creating a single document (or website, book, etc). Then save to whatever directory you see fit.

Open the newly created R project in RStudio. Then, open the .qmd file. This is where you will write your notes in markdown-style format.

The header of the .qmd is in YAML. Below is a standard YAML header I use for single quick-n-dirty documents that includes my name, date, and a table of contents (uncomment the code). Go on the Quarto website for more YAML information to make your documents more stylistic.

#---
#title: "intro_quarto"
#author: "Jessica Bolin"
#toc: true
#date: "March 18 2025"
#---

3. Publish to Quarto Pub

  1. Save the .qmd file.

  2. Navigate to root directory of the project (you should already be in it, if working in an R project)

  3. Open the Terminal tab, next to the Console

  4. Run quarto publish quarto-pub

    1. This will ask what account to publish it with. Press enter on the account you’re happy with. If you’re using Quarto for the first time, it will ask you to authorise your account. Follow the prompts (and make sure you’re logged into Quarto Pub in your default browser)

      Either you click the account you’ve published things with before:

      Or, you click ‘Use another account’, for which you need to click Enter or Y to authorize a new account for the first time.

    2. Press Enter for the document name (or choose a new name). This renders/previews the .qmd file

    3. After a couple seconds (or minutes, if you have a lot of content/images to render), the published website will open in your browser. In my case, it’s at https://jessicabolin.quarto.pub/intro_quarto/

      You will see in the console that Quarto has uploaded files, deployed the document and published it to your account via the following text:

      [✓] Preparing to publish document
      [✓] Uploading files (complete)
      [✓] Deploying published document
      [✓] Published document: https://jessicabolin.quarto.pub/intro_quarto
      [✓] Account site updated: https://jessicabolin.quarto.pub

    4. You will now see a file in your directory called _publish.yml. You don’t need to change anything - it just includes information (i.e., ID, URL) on where your document has been published to.

    5. If you ever want to update a document that’s already published, just repeat the above steps. It will ask you if you want to publish update - click enter and you’re good to go.

4. View on Quarto Pub

You can view your documents through the way someone from the public will see your account (for me, it’s https://jessicabolin.quarto.pub/ - replace with your username). This will list all of your published documents and websites etc.

5. Delete something from your Quarto Pub

If you want to remove something from your index of files on Quarto Pub, you need to do the following:

  1. Go to your account via https://quartopub.com/
  2. Click on the document you want to delete
  3. On the right, click delete site. Done!