Migrating my Blog from Hugo to Quarto

If you visited my old website in 2022, you’ll have noticed that things have changed around here. The biggest change is that I migrated the rendering engine from Hugo to Quarto. Why? Because a lot of my blog posts are computational and Quarto just works more easily for this purpose.

At the same time, I migrated from my .github.io domain to a custom jacobdawang.com domain which I purchased from Cloudflare for about $10 a year. To make this a triple whammy, I also migrated from GitHub pages to Cloudflare pages.

I have a GitHub action workflow set up to render and push the built site to Cloudflare pages on pushes to main and pull requests.

Here are five tips from my experience doing the migration:

For some reason, a top-level freeze: true in _quarto.yml was not enough to ensure individual blog posts don’t re-execute. I had to put freeze: true all the way down to the individual files.
Quarto builds pages with ugly links (ending in .html). Luckily Cloudflare automatically serves websites with pretty links, so you can navigate to /blog instead of /blog.html.
Deploying to a custom domain is actually really easy and I’m not sure why I didn’t do this in the past.
Giscus is a really cool way of integrating comments. I think the GitHub login requirement will lead to very few comments, but it’s still cool in theory.
If you’re restructuring your repo like I did, you can use the aliases Quarto option for each page so that the paths don’t change.

On a similar note, to automatically redirect from my github.io domain to my custom domain, I copied my new Quarto repo into my old one and just put the following in _quarto.yml, which includes an html redirect in every file to the corresponding path on my new domain:

format:
  html:
    theme:
      light: cosmo
      dark: solar
    css: styles.css
    toc: false
    include-in-header: 
      text: |
        <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://www.jacobdawang.com">
        <script type="text/javascript">
        window.location.href = "https://" + "www.jacobdawang.com" + window.location.pathname
        </script>

I know this will be a niche post, but if you’re into R and Quarto, I hope you enjoyed!