Support freeze for non-project qmd files

[th0ger]

Description

I would like for external contributors to execute content in their own environments/git repos.
They will store ipynb notebooks with data in source control

The notebooks are pushed into a central git quarto project that will combine, render (no execute) and publish the full project.

This should work for ipynb.
For qmd, I would have to use something like the freeze functionality. But it seems that freeze is only supported for quarto projects, and not when rendering single files.

Is there a way to execute stand-alone qmd-files, save the execution output, and copy it into a quarto project?

[mcanouil]

You need the _quarto.yml to make your project a "Quarto project" then use the freeze option or the fact that Jupyter Notebook cells are not by default executed by Quarto, see https://quarto.org/docs/projects/code-execution.html#notebooks.
Note that your collaborator will have to push the freeze files in addition to source files¹.

What do you think is missing?

Footnotes

1. this is the current behaviour of https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-web. ↩

[th0ger]

I'll like to support both qmd and ipynb (etc.) so contributers can pick their favorite.

Ipynb are simple and familiar, but has a weak point: The executed cells are included in the source code, which makes diff/review/merge hard.

Qmd is very nice, in that your .qmd is not modified when executed, but content can be stored in _freeze.
But it seems overkill to create a quarto project to be able to freeze a single qmd.
Also, these external quarto projects needs to be of the same type (website, blog) so the _freeze structure will fit into the target project?

[mcanouil]

I'll like to support both qmd and ipynb (etc.) so contributers can pick their favorite.

Quarto supports both, there is nothing to do in particular for this.

Ipynb are simple and familiar, but has a weak point: The executed cells are included in the source code, which makes diff/review/merge hard.

Indeed, but that's not something Quarto can do something about.

But it seems overkill to create a quarto project to be able to freeze a single qmd.

Overkill to create _quarto.yml with execute.freeze: auto/true/false?
A Quarto project is simply defined by the presence of _quarto.yml. it does not have to be a book, a website, manuscript, etc. i.e., quarto create project default myproject.

Also, these external quarto projects

What are external projects exactly?

Finally, are your contributors not cloning/forking (making a PR) the repository before working on it and contributing to it?

Additionally, I suggest to look for the caching feature, see https://quarto.org/docs/computations/caching.html.