Including JS from _quarto.yml not working

[neeldhara]

Description

I had this issue in my main repo, so recreated a MWE as follows: made a new quarto project (I'm using the VSCode extension) and changed _quarto.yml to:

project:
  type: website
  
website:
  title: "FooBar"
  navbar:
    left:
      - href: index.qmd
        text: Home
      - about.qmd

format:
  html:
    theme: cosmo
    js: scripts.js
    css: styles.css
    toc: true

which is to say, I only added the line js: scripts.js and added a file called scripts.js in the root directory. I haven't made any other changes to the barebones repo.

However, this doesn't seem to get picked up when I render the project? However, this seems to work fine on my website (but not on my local notes repo), so I am left a little puzzled. Sorry if I am missing something obvious 😬

To be honest I don't remember where I picked this up from when I was working on my website: I can't find this directive in the docs any more. Maybe it's not a thing (any more)?

[mcanouil]

I never saw js key in Quarto.
Usually, JavaScript are included with for example:

include-after-body:
  text: |
    <script type="application/javascript" src="myscript.js"></script>

Note that the include-* key to use will highly depends on what your JavaScript script does (mainly why js does not seem right at all).

If Quarto does not pick up the dependency to your website location, see https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-tools.html#site-resources.

[neeldhara]

Thanks for your prompt response. This is very good to know.

I do use the method you've suggested to include JS files locally, like I do for the interactions on this page.

I was a bit puzzled about why it works on my website. After your comment I checked again to realize that the pointer to scripts.js is included in my footer.html file which in turn is included by _quarto.yml using approved methods 😀

But I apparently forgot to remove the non-working js: key! In my defense, often when I have an invalid key, it gets highlighted in VSCode... so this had me wondering :)

[mcanouil]

YAML validation is a tricky thing right now in Quarto.
There is a long term plan to improve it, but for now it is what it is.
Note that you can have custom keys and keys passed to Pandoc, thus the tricky issue with YAML validation.

[neeldhara]

Ah, that makes sense. I'll be careful too! Thanks very much for your quick help with this :)