Overview

Welcome!

Quarto's logo; a blue circle divided into four equal quadrants

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 an Integrated Development Environment (IDE; e.g., RStudio, Positron) so many of your existing technical skills will likely serve you well here.

Citing These Materials

If you’d like to cite these materials, please use the following citation:

Lyon, N.J. (2026). Creating Websites with Quarto (v2.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20416930

Workshop Preparation

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

1. Prepare to use GitHub via an IDE

This workshop requires using an Integrated Development Environment of your choice (e.g., RStudio, Positron), as well as both Git and GitHub. In order to prepare, do all the pre-workshop steps relevant to our “Collaborative Coding with GitHub” workshop

2. Install Quarto

Before you can make a website with Quarto you will need to install it! Go to quarto.org to get started. Quarto seamlessly ties into your IDE software (e.g., RStudio, Positron) so you won’t need to learn how to navigate a new program.

NotePreparation Shortcut!

If you are exclusively interested in editing an existing Quarto website, all you need to do is create a GitHub profile!

However, note that editing websites directly through GitHub can cause issues and most such issues must be resolved in Positron/RStudio so the other preparation steps are required if you will be responsible for fixing any issues caused by direct edits to pages in GitHub.

Note on Code Snippets

Note that while most facets of this workshop can be accomplished in either an IDE or in GitHub, there are some code commands that must be run in an IDE. 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 your IDE while R code–if any–will have this symbol ().

In either Positron or RStudio, the “Terminal” tab should be just to the right of the “Console” tab.

Screenshot of 'Terminal' pane of Positron

Screenshot of 'Terminal' pane of RStudio

If you do not have an active Terminal session or don’t see a Terminal tab at all (only applies to RStudio), follow the instructions below for your IDE.

In Positron, you can make a new Terminal in any of the following ways:

  1. Go to the Terminal tab in the lower half of your Positron window and click the button
  2. Go to the Terminal menu at the top of your screen, click it, and select “New Terminal”
  3. Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + backtick
    • You can find the backtick (`) key just above the tab key (upper left corner) on most keyboards

In RStudio, you can make a new Terminal in any of the following ways:

  1. 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”.
  2. Use the keyboard shortcut Alt + Shift + R ( Windows) or Option + Shift + R ( Mac)

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.