Build a website with Quarto

How to turn a folder of Quarto documents into a full website — project structure, the _quarto.yml config, navigation, and one-command publishing to the web.

A single .qmd renders to a page. Point Quarto at a folder with a project file and it builds a whole website — navigation, search, theming and all. This very site is a Quarto project; here’s the shape of one.

The project file

A website is any directory containing a _quarto.yml with project: type: website:

project:
  type: website

website:
  title: "My Site"
  navbar:
    left:
      - href: index.qmd
        text: Home
      - href: about.qmd
        text: About
      - href: blog.qmd
        text: Blog

format:
  html:
    theme: cosmo
    css: styles.css

Every .qmd in the folder becomes a page; the navbar block wires them into the top menu. Add toc, search, a page-footer, social icons — it’s all declarative.

Rendering and previewing

From the project folder:

quarto preview   # live-reloading local preview while you write
quarto render    # build the whole site into _site/

quarto preview rebuilds and refreshes the browser every time you save — the fastest way to work.

A blog with almost no effort

Drop a listing into any page and Quarto assembles an index from a folder of posts, complete with an RSS feed:

---
title: "Blog"
listing:
  contents: posts
  sort: "date desc"
  categories: true
  feed: true
---

Each post is just a .qmd with a title, date and categories in its header. New file, next render, it’s on the site.

Publishing

One command pushes the rendered site live. Free options include:

quarto publish quarto-pub     # Quarto Pub
quarto publish gh-pages       # GitHub Pages
quarto publish netlify        # Netlify

For R-heavy sites, render locally first (so your machine’s R runs the code) and deploy the finished _site/ — that’s the pattern we use here. The full workflow is in the publishing lesson.

Why Quarto for a site

Your content, code and prose live in plain text under version control; the same document can be a web page and a PDF; and executable chunks mean charts and tables regenerate from data instead of being pasted in. For a technical or data-focused site, that’s hard to beat.

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Thinking about a data-driven site, dashboard or documentation hub in R and Quarto? We can help you build it.