How to use the README of a project as website homepage while avoiding subfolders in final URL?

[etiennebacher]

Description

Hello, I have a project in which I have a folder docs that contains all the files for a Quarto website. Here's a basic example of the structure of my project:

.
├── docs
│   ├── about.qmd
│   ├── index.qmd
│   └── _quarto.yml
├── README.md
└── src
    └── some_file.rs

This works fine but I would like the content of the README to be the homepage of the website. Currently, I have to duplicate the content of the README in index.qmd, which can lead to mistakes when I forgot to update both.

I tried to move _quarto.yml to the root of the repository, so that I have this in _quarto.yml:

website:
  title: "my-project"
  navbar:
    left:
      - href: docs/index.qmd
        text: Home
      - docs/about.qmd

and this in index.qmd:

---
format: html
---

{{< include ../README.md >}}

but now the URL to the page "About" is for example "mywebsite.com/docs/about.html" while I would like to have "mywebsite.com/about.html".

Is there a way to use the content of the README as the homepage while not having "docs" in the final URL?

---

Quarto 1.7.32

[mcanouil]

There are many many ways.
Note that in your example you want to include a file that is outside your project which goes against the design of reproducibility.

Two approaches amongst others:

1. Respect Quarto's design using a pre-render script that moves/copy README inside the project before rendering.
2. Use the "External" Quarto extension to break Quarto's design of having all contents live inside the project. (https://m.canouil.dev/quarto-extensions/)

[etiennebacher]

The pre-render script does the job for me, thanks!