Hosting

Quartz effectively turns your Markdown files and other resources into a bundle of HTML, JS, and CSS files (a website!).

However, if you’d like to publish your site to the world, you need a way to host it online. This guide will detail how to deploy with common hosting providers but any service that allows you to deploy static HTML should work as well.

Warning

The rest of this guide assumes that you’ve already created your own GitHub repository for Quartz. If you haven’t already, make sure you do so.

Hint

Some Quartz features (like RSS Feed and sitemap generation) require baseUrl to be configured properly in your configuration to work properly. Make sure you set this before deploying!

Cloudflare Pages

1. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard and select your account.
2. In Account Home, select Workers & Pages > Create application > Pages > Connect to Git.
3. Select the new GitHub repository that you created and, in the Set up builds and deployments section, provide the following information:

Configuration option	Value
Production branch	v4
Framework preset	None
Build command	npx quartz build
Build output directory	public

Press “Save and deploy” and Cloudflare should have a deployed version of your site in about a minute. Then, every time you sync your Quartz changes to GitHub, your site should be updated.

To add a custom domain, check out Cloudflare’s documentation.

Warning

Cloudflare Pages performs a shallow clone by default, so if you rely on git for timestamps, it is recommended that you add git fetch --unshallow && to the beginning of the build command (e.g., git fetch --unshallow && npx quartz build).

GitHub Pages

In your local Quartz, create a new file quartz/.github/workflows/deploy.yml.

quartz/.github/workflows/deploy.yml

name: Deploy Quartz site to GitHub Pages
 
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - v4
 
permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write
 
concurrency:
  group: "pages"
  cancel-in-progress: false
 
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0 # Fetch all history for git info
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: 18.14
      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: npm ci
      - name: Build Quartz
        run: npx quartz build
      - name: Upload artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v2
        with:
          path: public
 
  deploy:
    needs: build
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v2

Then:

1. Head to “Settings” tab of your forked repository and in the sidebar, click “Pages”. Under “Source”, select “GitHub Actions”.
2. Commit these changes by doing npx quartz sync. This should deploy your site to <github-username>.github.io/<repository-name>.

Hint

If you get an error about not being allowed to deploy to github-pages due to environment protection rules, make sure you remove any existing GitHub pages environments.

You can do this by going to your Settings page on your GitHub fork and going to the Environments tab and pressing the trash icon. The GitHub action will recreate the environment for you correctly the next time you sync your Quartz.

Info

Quartz generates files in the format of file.html instead of file/index.html which means the trailing slashes for non-folder paths are dropped. As GitHub pages does not do this redirect, this may cause existing links to your site that use trailing slashes to break. If not breaking existing links is important to you (e.g. you are migrating from Quartz 3), consider using Cloudflare Pages.

Custom Domain

Here’s how to add a custom domain to your GitHub pages deployment.

1. Head to the “Settings” tab of your forked repository.
2. In the “Code and automation” section of the sidebar, click “Pages”.
3. Under “Custom Domain”, type your custom domain and click “Save”.
4. This next step depends on whether you are using an apex domain (example.com) or a subdomain (subdomain.example.com).
   • If you are using an apex domain, navigate to your DNS provider and create an A record that points your apex domain to GitHub’s name servers which have the following IP addresses:
     • 185.199.108.153
     • 185.199.109.153
     • 185.199.110.153
     • 185.199.111.153
   • If you are using a subdomain, navigate to your DNS provider and create a CNAME record that points your subdomain to the default domain for your site. For example, if you want to use the subdomain quartz.example.com for your user site, create a CNAME record that points quartz.example.com to <github-username>.github.io.

The above shows a screenshot of Google Domains configured for both jzhao.xyz (an apex domain) and quartz.jzhao.xyz (a subdomain).

See the GitHub documentation for more detail about how to setup your own custom domain with GitHub Pages.

Why aren't my changes showing up?

There could be many different reasons why your changes aren’t showing up but the most likely reason is that you forgot to push your changes to GitHub.

Make sure you save your changes to Git and sync it to GitHub by doing npx quartz sync. This will also make sure to pull any updates you may have made from other devices so you have them locally.

Vercel

Fix URLs

Before deploying to Vercel, a vercel.json file is required at the root of the project directory. It needs to contain the following configuration so that URLs don’t require the .html extension:

vercel.json

{
  "cleanUrls": true
}

Deploy to Vercel

1. Log in to the Vercel Dashboard and click “Add New…” > Project
2. Import the Git repository containing your Quartz project.
3. Give the project a name (lowercase characters and hyphens only)
4. Check that these configuration options are set:

Configuration option	Value
Framework Preset	Other
Root Directory	./
Build and Output Settings > Build Command	npx quartz build

5. Press Deploy. Once it’s live, you’ll have 2 *.vercel.app URLs to view the page.

Custom Domain

Note

If there is something already hosted on the domain, these steps will not work without replacing the previous content. As a workaround, you could use Next.js rewrites or use the next section to create a subdomain.

1. Update the baseUrl in quartz.config.js if necessary.
2. Go to the Domains - Dashboard page in Vercel.
3. Connect the domain to Vercel
4. Press “Add” to connect a custom domain to Vercel.
5. Select your Quartz repository and press Continue.
6. Enter the domain you want to connect it to.
7. Follow the instructions to update your DNS records until you see “Valid Configuration”

Use a Subdomain

Using docs.example.com is an example of a subdomain. They’re a simple way of connecting multiple deployments to one domain.

1. Update the baseUrl in quartz.config.js if necessary.
2. Ensure your domain has been added to the Domains - Dashboard page in Vercel.
3. Go to the Vercel Dashboard and select your Quartz project.
4. Go to the Settings tab and then click Domains in the sidebar
5. Enter your subdomain into the field and press Add

Netlify

1. Log in to the Netlify dashboard and click “Add new site”.
2. Select your Git provider and repository containing your Quartz project.
3. Under “Build command”, enter npx quartz build.
4. Under “Publish directory”, enter public.
5. Press Deploy. Once it’s live, you’ll have a *.netlify.app URL to view the page.
6. To add a custom domain, check “Domain management” in the left sidebar, just like with Vercel.

GitLab Pages

In your local Quartz, create a new file .gitlab-ci.yaml.

.gitlab-ci.yaml

stages:
  - build
  - deploy
 
variables:
  NODE_VERSION: "18.14"
 
build:
  stage: build
  rules:
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME == "v4"'
  before_script:
    - apt-get update -q && apt-get install -y nodejs npm
    - npm install -g n
    - n $NODE_VERSION
    - hash -r
    - npm ci
  script:
    - npx quartz build
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  cache:
    paths:
      - ~/.npm/
    key: "${CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG}-node-${CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME}"
  tags:
    - docker
 
pages:
  stage: deploy
  rules:
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME == "v4"'
  script:
    - echo "Deploying to GitLab Pages..."
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public

When .gitlab-ci.yaml is committed, GitLab will build and deploy the website as a GitLab Page. You can find the url under Deploy > Pages in the sidebar.

By default, the page is private and only visible when logged in to a GitLab account with access to the repository but can be opened in the settings under Deploy → Pages.

Self-Hosting

Copy the public directory to your web server and configure it to serve the files. You can use any web server to host your site. Since Quartz generates links that do not include the .html extension, you need to let your web server know how to deal with it.

Using Nginx

Here’s an example of how to do this with Nginx:

nginx.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    root /path/to/quartz/public;
    index index.html;
    error_page 404 /404.html;
 
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404;
    }
}

Using Caddy

Here’s and example of how to do this with Caddy:

Caddyfile

example.com {
    root * /path/to/quartz/public
    try_files {path} {path}.html {path}/ =404
    file_server
    encode gzip
 
    handle_errors {
        rewrite * /{err.status_code}.html
        file_server
    }
}