quarto publish action deletes pr previews

[jwindhager]

Turns out that since quarto-cli v1.3 quarto publish (and, by extension, the corresponding GHA action) cleans the site directory before rendering (see for example b45bf0b). This means that all PR previews are deleted when a PR is merged. The fix for this is to adapt the publish workflow to not use the quarto publish action, but instead resort to the quarto render action and push the rendered page to the gh-pages branch manually.

[jwindhager]

I will fix this asap, but it might be a while. Happy if someone else (perhaps with copilot?) can take it before that :)

[jwindhager]

Just to keep the reference before closing my browser tab: quarto-dev/quarto-cli@246f070

[mahesh-panchal]

In practice this might not be a big issue. Normally there would likely be only one PR following a walkthrough. As long we're aware, schedule updates should only come when lessons have been merged too, so that should minimally affect previews too.

[jwindhager]

Yes, and the preview is probably recreated with the next commit to the affected PR, so the impact should be relatively small. Still good to leave this issue open until fixed, I guess.