Is there an easy way or option to host multiple rendered html Quarto Books under a single local web server?

[mickey.kawai]

I want to keep multiple different project html documents of Quarto Books without re-rendering in future, like:

~/Sites/
 |- project_a / index.html
 |- project_b / index.html

Q1. Is there such an option to achieve this?
I tried site-url: report_book_search_my and site-path: report_book_search_my, but they do not change the root path in index.html.

Q2. If there's no such option, what is a good way to achieve multiple projects hosted under a single web server at local?

In order to keep the rendered html documents of Quarto Book with search functionality available in future without re-rendering, we need a local web server. This is because javascript-depending search functionality does not work if we open local html file on modern browsers as file:// (i.e. just open the index.html on a browser) because of CORS (cross-origin resource sharing)-security issue.

Under a web server, this can be achieved as follows, as far as I only want single project just below the document root.

mkdir ~/Sites
cd ~/Sites
npx serve .
#http://localhost:3000
#click deny to keep it local when macos asks if inbound connection is allowed or not. 
ln -s <my_quarto_dir>/_book ~/Sites/<any_name_i_want>

But it does not work if we want to organize multiple project directories under ~/Sites/ as above. This is because index.html assumes root as / such as these:

<script src="site_libs/quarto-nav/quarto-nav.js"></script>
<script src="site_libs/quarto-nav/headroom.min.js"></script>
...
  <a href="./index.html" class="sidebar-item-text sidebar-link active">
...
  <a href="./intro.html" class="sidebar-item-text sidebar-link">
...

I couldn't find an option to change document root when we render (or publish to any user-defined web server).

My workaround is as follows:

1. Create scripts/add-base.sh to add <base> tag to change document root.

• add-base.sh

#!/bin/bash

mv _book/index.html _book/index.orig.html

name=$(basename "$(pwd)")

# path-absolute-URL string like `/foo` with trailing `/`, i.e. `/foo/` works. 
# to add e.g. `<base href="/report_book_search/">`
perl -spe 's!\<head\>\n!\<head\>\n\<base href\="/$name/">\n!;' -- -name=$name _book/index.orig.html > _book/index.html

# scheme-relative-special-URL string works, too. 
# to add e.g. `<base href="http://localhost:3000/report_book_search/">`
#perl -spe 's!\<head\>\n!\<head\>\n\<base href\="http://localhost:3000\/$name/">\n!;' -- -name=$name _book/index.orig.html > _book/index.html

# path-relative URL string like <base href="./report_book_search/"> does not work.  (some links fails with '/' at the end or url such as `http://localhost:3000/report_book_search/`.)

rm ~/Sites/$name
ln -s -f "$(pwd)"/_book ~/Sites/$name

2. Add 2 lines of post-render: at project: section of yaml as follows.

project:
  type: book
  post-render: 
    - scripts/add-base.sh

These steps enable multiple projects hosted under a single web server. (When to test on RStudio with http://localhost:<portnum>, comment out these two lines).

But I wonder is there easier and better way to achieve this? Thanks.

[cderv]

Sorry for the delay on this one.

Could you open an issue or discussion in https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli repo with a reproducible example (as a github repo for instance)?

This will help us look into this, as with an example we can run it will be easier to understand what you are observing.

[mickey.kawai]

Done, I opened this issue there.
c.f. Multiple rendered html Quarto Books cannot be put under a single local web server. · Issue #11115 · quarto-dev/quarto-cli · GitHub

[mickey.kawai]

The solution is as below, thanks to the help by mcanouil at github.

• Change output dir by adding output-dir: at project: in yml such that rendered dir should be output directly under the desired web server document root.

• _quarto.yml:

project:
  type: book
  output-dir: /Users/<account>/Sites/mybook7

book:
  site-url: mybook7
  title: "mybook7"
  author: "Norah Jones"
  date: "10/19/2024"
  chapters:
    - index.qmd
    - intro.qmd
    - summary.qmd
    - references.qmd

bibliography: references.bib

format:
  html:
    theme: cosmo
  pdf:
    documentclass: scrreprt

• Both site-url: mybook7 and site-url: http://localhost:3000/mybook7 work.
• Note that the softlink approach I described before does not work with this yml contrary to the workaround approach of adding <base> tag like <base href="http://localhost:3000/mybook2/">, despite the file contents are the same. That is, output-dir: <document_root>/mybook7 is mandatory. (It might possibly be because of CORS security issue of recent browser/javascript...)