[Feature]: Render Quarto automatically

[k-doering-NOAA]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Quarto is an up and coming replacement for R markdown (and I think bookdown); it also extends capabilities of R markdown by being less r centric.

Describe the solution you would like.

• A reusable workflow or flows to render Quarto files that r users may want to use
• A function or functions to set up the files users need to run this workflow.

Describe alternatives you have considered

This capability may exist in other repositories, though I am not sure yet. This quarto actions repo provides some links that may be useful. There may be more links out there, this is just one I found upon a quick google search.

If there is already reusable workflows for quarto elsewhere, we can test them out and provide instructions to users on how to set them up to make them easily findable for users of ghactions4r.

Additional context

No response

[k-doering-NOAA]

Luckily, there is an example, too: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-actions/blob/main/examples/quarto-publish-example.yml

[k-doering-NOAA]

This should be scoped to quarto docs that run R code only.

• Install R, as this is a ghactions4r action, so assuming Quarto is rendering some R code

For other dependencies, users can have 2 choices

• use renv and install from there
• use a DESCRIPTION file for install

We probably want separate actions that can 1) render quarto and 2) publish quarto automatically.

[k-doering-NOAA]

This one is proving difficult. I am struggling with making the output location correct for the artifact in a generalized way.

Maybe a good approach is to just get a render workflow working for each of the main types of quarto products folks use, then work on generalizing it. Also, reading the quarto documentation might help, too!

Partial work here: https://github.com/nmfs-ost/ghactions4r/tree/render-quarto

And was trying to test from here: https://github.com/k-doering-NOAA/test-github-guide

quarto render --to pdf - option to render to a single format.

Note that renv may provide better CI results with older documents.

This article may be helpful in explaining the ways quarto dev suggest using CI: https://quarto.org/docs/publishing/ci.html#rendering-for-ci

Carlos planning to work with the Quarto team to add an example here: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-actions

[k-doering-NOAA]

For now, I'm removing this from the 1.0.0 milestone, as no one has asked for it specifically and it has been difficult to generalize. I think it is worth picking up again when there are clear use cases for it.

[k-doering-NOAA]

I added to 1.1.0, but I think it can be removed if 1) there aren't good use cases for it still and if 2) generalizing is still too difficult.