How to define the root folder for my qmd content

[dweng0]

Description

Is there a way to explicitly tell quarto where root content folder is? By root content folder I mean all the content that is to be published. I have taken a look at the _quarto.yml and can't see any thing that dictates the root file. I also searched through the QA discussion and couldn't find anything. Is it possible?

My problem

My root content is held in a folder called content. When quarto renders this, the url shows as localhost/content. But really i want it to just be localhost. Ie content folder should be treated as the root.

[mcanouil]

At first I thought you were looking for working-dir, see https://quarto.org/docs/projects/code-execution.html#working-dir.

But it's unclear what you want to have.
Quarto will keep your source code directory tree structure, because it has no reason to flatten this.
You can use aliases or as you seem to do _redirects Netlify configuration file to make it look like the files are served from your website root, see https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-navigation.html#redirects.

---

For a more precise answer, you might want to consider sharing a small self-contained "working" (reproducible) example to work with, i.e., a complete Quarto document or a Git repository.

You can share a Quarto document using the following syntax, i.e., using more backticks than you have in your document (usually four ````).

````qmd
---
title: "Reproducible Quarto Document"
format: html
---

This is a reproducible Quarto document using `format: html`.
It is written in Markdown and contains embedded R code.
When you run the code, it will produce a plot.

```{r}
plot(cars)
```

The end.
````

[dweng0]

As i was writing this QA I was wondering if my directory stratergy was correct for Quarto, your comment has confirmed it for me. will adjust my directory structure

[allefeld]

I have the same question. I'm working on software in a GitHub repository project, and I want to publish its documentation via GitHub pages from the same repository. To keep things orderly, I have the documentation source files in a separate subdirectory /docs-sources. The documentation pages should be in the root of the served web page, e.g. https://allefeld.github.io/project/index.html.

When I render the source files through with this configuration in _quarto.yml:

project:
  type: website
  render:
    - docs-sources/
  output-dir: docs/

the rendered files get put into /docs/doc-sources/, where the subdirectory is unnecessary:

project/
    _quarto.yml
    docs-sources/
        index.qmd
    docs/
        index.html        <- contains only redirect
        docs-sources/
            index.html     <- rendered from index.qmd

And if I select /docs as the source for GitHub pages, visiting https://allefeld.github.io/project/ redirects me to https://allefeld.github.io/cvcrossmanova/docs-sources/index.html, i.e. what is just an organizational detail of my repository shows up in the URL.

What I'm looking for is to have the rendering ignore the \docs-sources subdirectory, take the files from there as if they were in /, and put the output files directly into \docs.

project/
    _quarto.yml
    docs-sources/
        index.qmd
    docs/
        index.html     <- rendered from index.qmd

I think 'root folder' is a reasonable description for this. E.g.

project:
  type: website
  render-root: docs-sources/
  output-dir: docs/

Previously I tried to put the Quarto project root (and therefore _quarto.yml) into the \docs-sources subdirectory. But then I can't render into a directory one level up, and VS Code gets confused when I try to render the Quarto Project while having the repository root open.

[allefeld]

Okay, seems I was wrong about not being able to render one level up. A workaround is to use the setup mentioned in the last paragraph, with

project:
  type: website
  output-dir: ../docs/

and to render the project only from outside VS Code, from the command line.

Interestingly, I can render individual files using the standard shortcut, and _quarto.yml settings are respected.

Seems like I found my solution, but maybe it would be worth mentioning this setup somewhere in the documentation.