Overview

Welcome!

This workshop covers how to use Quarto–a tool developed by Posit–to create easily customizable websites and host those sites on GitHub. Quarto includes a variety of user-friendly tools including a visual editor that allows users to insert headings and embed figures via buttons that are intuitively labeled rather than through somewhat arcane HTML text or symbols. Creating websites using Quarto is very similar to any other work in RStudio so many of your existing technical skills will likely serve you well here.

Workshop Preparation

To follow along with this workshop you will need to take the following steps:

1. Prepare to use GitHub via RStudio

This involves doing all of the pre-workshop steps relevant to our “Collaborative Coding with GitHub” workshop.

  • Install R
  • Install RStudio
  • Install Git
  • Make a GitHub account
  • Connect Git and GitHub
  • Celebrate!

2. Install Quarto

Before you can make a website with Quarto you will need to install it! This program seamlessly ties into RStudio so you won’t need to learn how to navigate a new program.

Note on Code Snippets

Note that while most facets of this workshop can be accomplished via RStudio or GitHub, there are some code commands that must be run. These commands are mostly Command Line Interface (CLI) not R code! To make this as clear as possible, if the plain text instructions have this symbol they should be run in the “Terminal” pane of RStudio while R code–if any–will have this symbol .

The “Terminal” pane of RStudio should be next to the “Console” pane of RStudio (see below). If you don’t have that pane, you can make a new one using the keyboard shortcut Alt + Shift + R (Windows) or Option + Shift + R (Mac). Alternately you can open a file in the top-level of your RStudio project then click through the following menu items at the top of the screen: “Code” “Terminal” “Open New Terminal at File Location”.

Screenshot of 'Terminal' pane of RStudio

Additional Information

Quarto is developing at a rapid pace so quality of life changes and new functionalities are introduced relatively frequently. Additionally, Quarto supports user-created “extensions” that can be downloaded in a given project and then used (similar to the way user-developed R packages can be shared) so if you want to do something that Quarto itself doesn’t support, chances are you’ll be able to find an extension that handles it.

Quarto’s documentation of website creation and formatting is extremely thorough and is a great resource as you become more comfortable with your new website.