I had a question on this directly on how to publish and then another one popped up on the NHS-R Community Slack so, in the principle of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) this is a short blog on how to publish (free!) slides, websites and reports through GitHub.
We publish all the NHS-R Community course slides through GitHub and the following refers to the Introduction to Quarto slides.
Setting up on GitHub
Publishing is through the Settings tab which is hidden unless you have rights to the repository.
There will be a Pages tab along the side which is where the settings can be changed https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/creating-a-github-pages-site.
The NHS-R Community course repositories publish through the “deploy from a branch” setting with main and root on the branch but note that these have a redirect on the pages to the NHS-R web url so is called nhsrcommunity.com. Pages that are published through GitHub usually have github.io in the url name.
For Quarto files
If you are publishing a series of slides, as the format is often for NHS-R Community courses, if you add a blank file to the folder and call it _quarto.yml it acts like an engine to all the slides so you don’t have to repeat code. An example is https://github.com/nhs-r-community/intro-quarto/blob/main/_quarto.yml where the author is coded once here but appears on all the slides in this project folder. This isn’t needed for publishing but can make your code a bit less cluttered if you have many files to publish and means you only have to make changes in one place.