Is it possible to schedule a post in Quarto?

[maikol-solis]

Hi!

I have set it up a quarto blog in github, but I am wondering if it's possible to schedule my posts to some specific day in the future?

I appreciate any advise or workflow in the matter.

Thanks

[dragonstyle]

I'm not sure about how Github would support scheduled rendering of documents, but one thing I can point to being a piece of the puzzle is the draft option for documents - if you set draft: true, the document will be not be included in listings (blogs), so you could write a document and mark it as a draft and have some scheduled task change the draft to false, then re-render it...

[cscheid]

If anyone wants to write that filter, we'd love to feature it in quarto-examples. It should be a matter of reading the system date while handling document metadata in a filter, something like:

Meta = function(meta)
  if is_after(meta.date, today()) then -- Note that I don't know how lua date functions work, and it very likely won't be "today()"!
    meta["draft"] = true
    return meta
  end
end

[dragonstyle]

It does raise the question of whether listings should exclude pages with dates in the future by default (or at least have a mode to do this).

[mcanouil]

It's not only about pages or child documents for listings, especially since listings can be built using only yaml.

[cscheid]

It's not only about pages or child documents for listings, especially since listings can be built using only yaml.

@mcanouil I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Can you clarify?

[mcanouil]

If the same kind of mechanism future date = draft is to be applied for listings, this implies all kind of listings, not only the ones based on child Quarto documents.
For example in my work in progress website, I am using the following listings, which are not all using "date" but they could:

• https://github.com/mcanouil/mickael.canouil.fr/blob/fix-issue23/projects.qmd
• https://github.com/mcanouil/mickael.canouil.fr/blob/fix-issue23/publications.qmd
• https://github.com/mcanouil/mickael.canouil.fr/blob/fix-issue23/talks.qmd

I have to admit that I do not know how Quarto is dealing with those listings formats.

[mcanouil]

You could set a CRON task in GitHub Actions and setup some workflow/steps to remove any draft or simply render the website/document.

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 12 * * mon,wed,fri"

[jimjam-slam]

If the blog is on GitHub Pages (or another JAMstack provider that triggers a render when a branch is committed to, like Netlify), it could even be as simple as writing the blog post on a branch, creating a PR for it and then scheduling the PR merge! Using, for example: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/merge-schedule

[maikol-solis]

This is an excellent workaround. Thanks!

[andrewpbray]

I tried my hand at implementing the filter described by @cscheid . It can be found here:

https://github.com/andrewpbray/scheduled-posts

It seems to work at appending draft: true to the meta data for documents with dates in the future, however I haven't gotten that to translate into the listing actually not showing those rendered documents. A repo demonstrating this behavior can be found here:

https://github.com/andrewpbray/scheduled-posts-example/tree/1ec797df398934079c3d6bc47b7c4d7129616222

Any ideas on how to troubleshoot this? My go-to solution has been rendering to native format and inspecting the AST, but quarto render posts.qmd --to native doesn't show any of the content of the listing and the listing.json does show all three posts. Does it have something to do with the order in which various filters are being run?

ps: the way this filter does the date comparison, using date-format: "X" seems like a bad idea and something to improve on.

[cscheid]

Hm. I think this means my approach won't work 😞. What's happening is that the listings functionality reads the metadata from the input, and not from the output, and the we don't realize that filters could have added metadata. This is a big bummer.

Let me talk with @dragonstyle and we'll get back to you.

[andrewpbray]

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

As I've been tinkering with this, I realize even when this works it will only fit about 3/4 of my use case. The functionality around draft: true is very narrowly about listings and search. I've realized that what I want is something broader: I want to render .qmds subject to the date metadata in a doc.

My plan for this is to write a pre-render script that copies all of the docs not in the future into a directory that is subject to a targeted render, then a post-render script that cleans out that directory. Ideally this could be accomplished script-free in the _quarto.yml directly, but . . . I imagine this functionality won't come along anytime soon.

[andrewpbray]

@cscheid Here's an approach that does seem to work:

https://github.com/andrewpbray/scheduled-posts-example

It uses a pre-render script that edits the QUARTO_PROJECT_INPUT_FILES variable by removing files that are in the future.

It's not as elegant as calling a filter, but it has the advantage of making the future posts completely absent from the website (instead of just unlinked).

[andrewpbray]

@maikol-solis I think I've finally settled upon a robust way to do this.

https://github.com/qmd-lab/scheduled-docs

[maikol-solis]

Thanks! I'll check this out.