Last-modified when using github actions to publish

[adityam]

Description

I am using github actions to publish my website.

1. Website: https://adityam.github.io/stochastic-control/
2. Github action: https://github.com/adityam/stochastic-control/blob/quarto/.github/workflows/quarto-render.yml

In _quarto.yml, I have set

format:
  html:
    published-title: Updated
    date: last-modified

but all my pages have today's date.

I suspect that the last modified date is coming from the date the date when github CI clones the repo (and hence today's date) rather than when the file was checked into the repo (which is the true last-modified date).

Is it possible to somehow use the date when the file was last committed to git, for example, similar to what is available for hugo

[mcanouil]

last-modified is for the rendered document not the Quarto document.
Since you don't use freeze, everything is rendered every time, thus every render is the last modified time, because indeed, the HTML files are modified.

If you don't want this, use freeze, see https://quarto.org/docs/projects/code-execution.html#freeze.

[cderv]

last-modified is for the rendered document not the Quarto document.

@mcanouil last-modified is the date of the input file. When

date: last-modified

we are looking for the last modified date of the input file using Deno.statSync(). So this is supposed to be the date of the Quarto document.

freeze should not have an impact I believe, as it should just be for computation. I think the date will still be resolved for a date: today even when freezing.

If this is not working like this, then I think this is not what we are expecting. I wanted to add precision on this to not be misleading on how last-modified is working.

Regarding the specific github action rendering here, I believe @adityam found the solution as #5899 (comment) shows

the issue is that with Github Action, the project is checkout from github at each rendered, and unfortunately Git does not store the last modified date. This means the last modified date of the source is the same as the date of the rendering.
This means last-modified is not working as expected in such render environment.

Not that useful then... it will only works on project where source file are local and do not get their last modified date tweaked by Git.

It requires a bit of processing using script as done in current workaround (there are helper tool for that too https://github.com/BenLubar/git-last-modified).

[mcanouil]

@cderv it makes sense, but the documentation is not that clear.

The last modified date and time of the file containing the date.

See https://quarto.org/docs/reference/dates.html.

[cderv]

Yep sure no problem to rephrase. What would you add ?

[mcanouil]

"Input" since file can also refer to the rendered/output file. 😉

[adityam]

Thanks.

I could not get freeze:auto to work with github actions. I do not want to freeze the rendering ... freezing rendering could lead to stale links in cross refs (if the frozen page was referring to theorems/equations in other chapters).

After a bit of googling, I found this script:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21735435/git-clone-changes-file-modification-time/55609950#55609950

Adding that as a github action does exactly what I want: it changes the mtime of all files to be the same as the last time that file was added to git.

[adityam]

Thanks!

[lnnrtwttkhn]

hey @adityam, I have the same problem. could you point to an example how you implemented this in a github actions workflow? thanks!

[adityam]

See here: https://github.com/adityam/stochastic-control/blob/quarto/.github/workflows/quarto-render.yml