Publishing Quarto sites internally

[jules32]

@ateucher will explore options to do this, a common challenge raised by Josh L yesterday at the Champions 3-month checkin

[jules32]

Update from Coworking today from @ateucher ; more notes/screenshots in our agenda doc

Summary: Adding password protection to Quarto-made websites: this is really promising, and may become the way NOAA can meet goals of password-protected website to include users outside of GitHub enterprise. staticryptR R package (builds on will encrypt the HTML files so if they go to the website, they will see a password. So the source vs the rendered are 2 different things; source could be public or Enterprise or Posit Connect and rendered html password protected.

@ateucher demoed this in the https://github.com/ateucher/quarto-private-website

• Has _quarto.yml, include encrypt.R
• Has encrypt.R, need to set password.
  • Don’t do this in a public repository.
  • In private repo, if you trust your other collabs, this could be ok to do
  • Other options available, Andy to dig in deeper and help document

Deployment setup is one thing to work on: requires Node installed at admin level. Options:

• Use 2i2c JupyterHub; Node is already installed so folks could use this there
• Another option for deployment with GitHub Actions, running the encryption there: https://github.com/ateucher/quarto-private-test1. Andy tested and works! Andy will flesh out the documentation for this.

[k-doering-NOAA]

@ateucher thanks for all the investigation! @jmlondon tagging you for awareness

I realized I was mistaken about how our licensing works for Posit connect; it turns out that we are able to internally publish static content, just not interactive content (details here)

So the good new is we can internally publish quarto sites on our Posit Connect Server, I added documentation here for NOAA folks: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1783zEdKFgTOWg4eayePrPjqAS9j6pN1hNPqd8h787Ao/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.cluvozkp9fh9

[jmlondon]

Thanks for the effort and workflow details, @ateucher ! And, thanks for the clarification re: our Posit license, @k-doering-NOAA. I still think it's a useful tool to have in our belt -- and, certainly, if anyone wants to publish internal Shiny apps.

[ateucher]

I've finished documenting two ways of doing this, with a template repository for each, which you can use as a starting point:

1. local render and encryption, that requires installing Node on your computer: https://github.com/ateucher/quarto-private-website. This should work on the Openscapes Hub as it has Node installed already

OR

2. Render and encrypt using GitHub Actions, which means you don't have to install Node on your computer (but you have a little less control, and if things go awry it will require debugging GitHub Actions, which is always tricky): https://github.com/ateucher/quarto-private-gh-actions

Please let me know if you try these out and if they work for you, or you have trouble with them!

[stefaniebutland]

Closing this issue, as @ateucher has documented above.