Airwave-site — Build & Deploy (RStudio-friendly)

This README explains how to build and deploy the Quarto site using RStudio and no GitHub. It assumes you have Quarto installed and will use RStudio’s GUI (Render button or R console).

Requirements (one-time)

  • Quarto — https://quarto.org: download and install the Windows installer.
  • R and RStudio (recommended).

Render & preview using RStudio (no terminal needed)

  1. Open RStudio and set the working directory to your airwave-site/ project folder: Session → Set Working Directory → To Project Directory (or To Source File Location if you opened index.qmd).

  2. Open the file index.qmd in the RStudio editor.

  3. To render the site, either:

  • Click the Render button at the top of the editor pane (RStudio will call Quarto and produce the _site/ folder), or
  • Run this in the R console:
quarto::quarto_render()
  1. To preview the site locally with live reload, run in the R console:
quarto::quarto_preview()

Then open the local URL printed in the console. (To stop the preview server press Esc in the console or click Stop.)

Create a ZIP of the built site (for Netlify Drop)

After rendering, the built site is in the _site/ folder. To create a ZIP file without leaving RStudio you can:

  1. Use Windows Explorer (graphical):

In RStudio Files pane, click on _site to open it in Windows Explorer (click the little arrow next to the folder in the Files pane and choose “Open Folder”).

Select all files/folders inside _site, right-click → Send to → Compressed (zipped) folder. This creates a .zip you can upload to Netlify Drop.

  1. Or use R to create a zip (requires the zip package):

install.packages(“zip”) # if not already installed zip::zipr(“../airwave-site_build.zip”, files = list.files(“_site”, full.names = TRUE))

This will create airwave-site_build.zip in the project root.

Deploy to Netlify (quick, no Git required)

Go to https://app.netlify.com/drop

Drag the airwave-site_build.zip file (created above) onto the page. Netlify will host the site and give you a URL.

Optional: keep local copies of code & data

Add a code/ folder to the project to store reproducible R scripts (without private/raw data). Keep data files out of the site folder if you plan to deploy publicly.

Troubleshooting

If widgets appear within white boxes, double-check you embedded the widgets/*.html files and that styles.css is present in the project root. The site CSS forces transparency, but embedding with a non-transparent container will override it.

If quarto::quarto_render() errors, confirm Quarto is installed and visible to RStudio. Restart RStudio after installing Quarto.