Posit Connect Cloud

Pre-release Feature

This feature is new in the upcoming Quarto 1.9 release. To use the feature now, you’ll need to download and install the Quarto pre-release.

Overview

Posit Connect Cloud is an online platform from Posit for deploying and sharing data applications and documents. Use Posit Connect Cloud when you want a hosted service for publishing Quarto documents and websites without managing your own infrastructure.

Note

Looking for self-hosted deployment within your organization? See Posit Connect.

There are several ways to publish Quarto content to Posit Connect Cloud:

Use the quarto publish command to publish locally rendered content.
Publish source content from a GitHub repository for server-side rendering with automatic redeployment on push.
Publish source content from an IDE (Positron, VS Code, or RStudio).

Each of these options is covered below. If you are just getting started, we recommend using quarto publish (the first approach).

Publish Command

The quarto publish command is the easiest way to publish locally rendered content. From the directory where your project is located, execute:

Terminal

quarto publish posit-connect-cloud

If you haven’t previously published to Posit Connect Cloud, a browser will open to authenticate using your Posit account:

Terminal

$ quarto publish posit-connect-cloud
 ? Open a browser to authenticate (Y/n) ›

After authenticating, your content will be rendered and deployed, and a browser will open to view your published content on Posit Connect Cloud.

A record of your previous publishes will be stored in a _publish.yml file within the project or document directory. For example:

- source: project
  posit-connect-cloud:
    - id: "5f3abafe-68f9-4c1d-835b-9d668b892001"
      url: "https://connect.posit.cloud/content/..."

Account information is not stored in this file, so it is suitable for checking in to version control and being shared by multiple publishers.

You can customize the behavior of quarto publish by providing the following command line options:

Option	Behavior
`--no-prompt`	Do not prompt to confirm publish actions.
`--no-browser`	Do not open a browser after publish.
`--no-render`	Do not re-render prior to publish

To publish a document rather than a website or book, provide the path to the document:

Terminal

quarto publish posit-connect-cloud document.qmd

Multiple Accounts

If you have multiple Posit accounts, you’ll be prompted to choose which account to publish with. You can manage stored accounts using:

Terminal

quarto publish accounts

Publishing Source Content

The quarto publish command publishes locally rendered content. To publish source content for server-side rendering on Posit Connect Cloud, use one of the following methods.

GitHub

Posit Connect Cloud can publish directly from a GitHub repository. When you push changes to the connected branch, Posit Connect Cloud automatically re-renders and redeploys your content. This is ideal for scheduled reports and collaborative projects.

See the Posit Connect Cloud documentation on Publishing from GitHub for setup instructions and details.

IDE

You can publish source content directly from your editor using:

Posit Publisher — A VS Code / Positron extension for deploying content to Posit Connect Cloud. Pre-installed in Positron; available from the VS Code Marketplace for VS Code.
rsconnect — The rsconnect R package can deploy R content programmatically from RStudio or any R session.

See the Posit Connect Cloud documentation on Publishing from an IDE for setup instructions and details.

Continuous Integration

You can publish to Posit Connect Cloud from a CI service by scripting the quarto publish command with environment variables for authentication. These tokens are generated during the interactive quarto publish flow and stored locally — use quarto publish accounts to view stored credentials.

Variable	Description
`POSIT_CONNECT_CLOUD_ACCESS_TOKEN`	OAuth access token for authentication (required).
`POSIT_CONNECT_CLOUD_REFRESH_TOKEN`	OAuth refresh token (required).
`POSIT_CONNECT_CLOUD_ACCOUNT_ID`	Account ID to publish with (required if you have multiple accounts).

Terminal

export POSIT_CONNECT_CLOUD_ACCESS_TOKEN="..."
export POSIT_CONNECT_CLOUD_REFRESH_TOKEN="..."
quarto publish posit-connect-cloud --no-prompt --no-browser

See the article on Publishing with CI for additional details on non-interactive use of quarto publish.