Get started with quartodown

quartodown builds a website for an R package with Quarto. This guide sets up a package, builds its site, and publishes it on GitHub Pages.

Set up

From the root of your package, run:

quartodown::use_quartodown()

This writes _quartodown/_quartodown.yml, and adds the files the build generates to .gitignore and .Rbuildignore. _quartodown.yml is where you can customize your site. If your package already has a _pkgdown.yml, see Coming from pkgdown for how its settings carry over.

Build the site

quartodown::build_site()

build_site() builds the site into docs/ and, in an interactive session, opens it in your browser. The page reloads when you rebuild, and preview_site() opens it again if you’ve closed it. Examples and vignettes run against your package’s current source. While iterating, build_site(devel = TRUE) is faster because it loads the package with pkgload::load_all() instead of installing it.

The following is added to your site:

• Home page: your README.md. Next to it, a sidebar links to the source code, the bug tracker and CRAN (if the package is there), and shows the license, citation and authors from DESCRIPTION. Any badges in your README (between <!-- badges: start --> and <!-- badges: end -->) are moved into the sidebar.
• Reference: a page for each help topic in man/, plus an index page listing them all.
• Get started: the vignette with the same name as your package, like this one.
• Articles: all your other vignettes, including any in subfolders such as vignettes/articles/.
• Changelog: your NEWS.md. Issue numbers like #123 and GitHub usernames like @user become links.

Publish on GitHub Pages

To build the site and deploy it to the gh-pages branch on every push, add a GitHub Actions workflow:

quartodown::use_quartodown_action()

This writes .github/workflows/quartodown.yaml. Commit and push it. Once its first run has created the gh-pages branch, go to the Pages section of your repository’s settings on GitHub and choose to deploy from that branch.

Learn more

Customizing your site covers everything _quartodown.yml can change.

Quarto features shows Quarto’s authoring features, such as callouts, tabsets and footnotes, on a quartodown site.

Technical details explains how a build works.