How can I publish a Quarto website and blog on Netlify with GH Actions, while using individual renv projects per blog post?

[pedrotercero3]

Description

The title is pretty convoluted, so let me explain: I have created a Quarto website (here is a reprex: https://github.com/pedrotercero3/quarto-website-test) which also contains a blog. I am using renv globally for the website project, and I am also trying to use individual renv environments for each of the blog posts. The rationale is to keep the project organized, so that for example I can use version 2 of ggplot2 in one blog post and version 2.5 in another.

I am using the GitHub Actions workflow available in the Quarto guide to publish the website on Netlify. It works fine when renv is only used for the website project. However, when I initialize a renv environment in one of the blog posts, the GitHub actions fails because it is using the global renv lock.file instead of the specific one for the blog post (so, for example, if I am using ggplot2 in the blog post but not on the website, it can't find it).

My question is: is there a way to modify the GH Actions workflow so that it uses the global renv environment for the website and the individual renv environments for each of the blog posts? Thanks in advance, and sorry if the question is stupid, I find all of this pretty confusing.

[mcanouil]

First, Quarto cannot use multiple environments.
Now, using incremental rendering and freeze, you could use renv profiles for example to activate one and rendering one page, etc. for each.
Then you can write your own GitHub action.
Note that the Quarto GitHub Actions does not do anything fancy, you can take a look at the source code.

For short, you have to write your own workflow to activate/render.

[pedrotercero3]

Thank you very much for the quick answer. It's good to know that it is not possible to do this with Quarto, at least not out of the box. Maybe my idea doesn't make that much sense in the end? The thing is that if I use R 4.4.2 and ggplot2 3.5.1 for a blog post now, and then the current versions of both 4 years from now for a different blog post, I don't see how using renv keeps the whole thing reproducible, given that I can't keep using the old versions of the packages for the old blog post. Is there something that I'm missing and there's already a way to address this in Quarto?

[cscheid]

The Quarto feature that we built with this kind of usecase in mind is freeze, which @mcanouil brought up in his answer: https://quarto.org/docs/projects/code-execution.html#freeze

[mcanouil]

The short idea is to activate freeze, then something like the code below for each document

export FILE=path/to/my-document.qmd
Rscript -e 'renv::activate(profile = Sys.getenv("FILE"))'
Rscript -e 'renv::hydrate(sources = Sys.getenv("FILE"), prompt = FALSE)'
Rscript -e 'renv::snapshot(prompt = FALSE)'
quarto render ${FILE}

...

For the whole project using the "freezer":

Rscript -e 'renv::activate(profile = "default")'
quarto render --use-freezer

Code obviously not tested.