quartodown

quartodown is an R package that turns your package’s README, help pages and vignettes into a website, rendered entirely by Quarto.

Why quartodown?

Every page, help pages included, is a Quarto page, so you get:

• every Quarto feature, from callouts and tabsets to code annotations and cross-references, on every page;
• Quarto’s themes, extensions and settings.

On top of that, quartodown adds:

• the package website layout R users know from pkgdown: a home page sidebar, a grouped function reference, articles and a changelog;
• function links with hover tooltips.

Installation

Install the stable version from CRAN:

install.packages("quartodown")

or the development version from GitHub:

# pak::pak("BjarkeHautop/quartodown")
install.packages("quartodown", repos = c('https://bjarkehautop.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

quartodown also needs Quarto installed.

Usage

Browse the site to see how it looks! Quarto features shows callouts, tabsets, footnotes and more on a quartodown site. If you like what you see, and want to use it for your own package, run:

quartodown::use_quartodown()

This writes _quartodown/_quartodown.yml, with a reference: field that lists your package’s current functions in one section; edit it to group them however you’d like. It also gitignores the files the build generates.

If your package already has a pkgdown site, most of _pkgdown.yml can be copied over as is; see Coming from pkgdown.

Then build the site:

quartodown::build_site()

In an interactive session, this also opens the site in your browser.

To publish it on GitHub Pages, run quartodown::use_quartodown_action(). It writes a GitHub Actions workflow that builds the site on every push and deploys it to the gh-pages branch.

See Customizing for everything _quartodown.yml can configure.

Packages using quartodown

• jlbind

Using quartodown for your package? Feel free to open a pull request adding it to this list.