Encrypted Static (Quarto) Website

This is a skeleton template for a Quarto website that is password protected and deployed on GitHub Pages.

The website is built and deployed on GitHub Actions.

The GitHub Action, quarto-staticrypt-ghpages.yml does the following:

• Renders the Quarto project via quarto render.
• Adds password via staticrypt
• deploys to Github Pages (given correct configuration as per below)

It assumes any computations are run locally and tracked via the Freeze execution option (i.e. freeze: true in _quarto.yml).

Use the "Use this template" button to create a new private GitHub repo with all the files in this repo.

Configure password and protected pages

Modify website build and encryption settings in quarto-staticrypt-ghpages.yml as necessary:

build:
...
env:
   PROTECTED_DIR: _site
   PASSWORD: password
   # PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.YOUR_SECRET }}

• PROTECTED_DIR should match your Quarto project output directory, which by default is output_dir: _site.
  • To protect a folder of pages rather than your whole website, modify _site to _site/folder.
• PASSWORD sets the encryption password for all pages in PROTECTED_DIR.
  • For simplicity, the password is specified by default in plain-text as shown. This means anyone who can access the repository can open this file and read the password. Therefore, make sure your repository remains PRIVATE.
  • A more secure option, with slightly more setup is to store the password in a GitHub Secret. Follow these instructions to add secret repository variable that stores your password separately from the github action file. Make sure you comment/uncomment the relevant PASSWORD: line, and the name of your secret matches what's in the file (e.g. YOUR_SECRET)

Configure GitHub Pages Site Deployment

1. Go to Settings/Pages and find "Build and deployment" and set "Source" to "GitHub Actions".
2. A little further down the page, check "Enforce HTTPS"

Updating your Quarto Website

1. Make changes to .qmd files. Commit as needed
2. Re-render your website, with freeze: true. This should create/update the rendered content in _site/, and cache any computational output in _freeze.
3. Commit the _freeze folder. _site is ignored by default (in .gitignore) since the GitHub Action renders and deploys the website from source.
4. Push your changes to GitHub. The push should trigger the action, which will render the website using the frozen computation output, encrypt the specified pages, then deploy the protected website to GitHub pages.

Adding encryption to existing Quarto Website

To add encryption to an existing website, simply:

1. Copy and paste quarto-staticrypt-ghpages.yml into .github/workflows/ your existing repo, creating the folder if it doesn't exist.
2. configure GitHub Pages to deploy from GitHub Actions as per instructions above.

Modify Action to run Computations before rendering Quarto Website.

If you want to run your computations on GitHub actions before rendering the website:

• uncomment the R code steps in the build job of quarto-staticrypt-ghpages.yml
• [optional] change freeze: true to auto or false in _quarto.yml