Quarto Cloudflare Pages plugin

[jimjam-slam]

The Quarto Netlify plugin and GitHub Actions work great!

One other publisher we've been using a lot is Cloudflare Pages. It uses the same JAMstack model as Netlify, but it comes with some nice extras like free unlimited bandwidth and free access control for up to 50 users (although admittedly that can be a bit of a pain to configure).

Cloudflare Pages supports plugins. I'm admittedly not too clear on how differently they function to Netlify's build plugins, but anecdotes seem to indicate they're pretty similar! 😅

You can, of course, render locally and deploy the rendered folder to Pages (just like Netlify or any other static host), but I wanted to put it on your radar!

[burgerga]

If you want to use Quarto with Cloudflare Pages, you only need to make very small changes to your Github action: since pushing to the gh-pages branch will automatically update your repo settings to use the gh-pages branch to serve Github Pages, this needs to be updated to a different branch. The steps:

1. Create your quarto site
2. Create .github/workflows/publish.yml from https://quarto.org/docs/publishing/github-pages.html#publish-action
3. Split render and publish into two steps
   • Use quarto-dev/quarto-actions/render instead of quarto-dev/quarto-actions/publish
   • Use https://github.com/peaceiris/actions-gh-pages to publish to the cf-pages branch, from the rendered _site (or _book directory, depending on your quarto project)

Example .github/workflows/publish.yml file:

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    branches: main

name: Quarto Publish

jobs:
  build-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: write
    steps:
      - name: Check out repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Set up Quarto
        uses: quarto-dev/quarto-actions/setup@v2

      - name: Render
        uses: quarto-dev/quarto-actions/render@v2

      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v4
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_branch: cf-pages
          publish_dir: _site

Then create the Pages application in your Cloudflare Pages dashboard and point it to the cf-pages branch of your repo (you can leave all the build config empty).

Adding a password to your pages site

You can use CloudFlare Zero Access to add access control to your Pages application (free for up to 50 users), see https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/known-issues/#enable-access-on-your-pagesdev-domain.
Alternatively, if you just want to add a password to your site, you can follow the steps at https://github.com/Charca/cloudflare-pages-auth. To make sure the functions directory ends up in your cf-pages branch, add the functions directory to the resources option (https://quarto.org/docs/reference/projects/options.html) in your _quarto.yml, e.g.:

project:
  type: website
  resources:
  - functions/

...