Setting up a Quarto website with Netlify and Github Actions
Intro
Configuring urls for websites is a hassle and I forget how to do so everytime I need to do it. Maybe if I write it down, I’ll remember it next time.
Deployment
Thanks to quarto, creating local static websites has become a breeze. Since I have been using quarto for basically everything I can recently, I made my personal website through it as well.
Now I want to be able to deploy it onto my google domains url and have it automatically update when I push to github. I am using github actions alongside netlify to do this.
Using Github actions to do this means that I can have a single source of truth for my website and not have to worry about manually updating it. I can just push to github and it will automatically update. And with the editing UI, I don’t even need to clone the repo for minor changes like yaml file updates.
Both the structure of this repo and the github actions workflow are heavily inspired by this repo by David Dimmery.
DNS
netlify makes it very convienent to set up a custom domain. No messing around with CNAMES or anything. Just point the custom dns server to netlify and it will automatically set up the rest. The netlify dns servers are:
dns1.p06.nsone.net
dns2.p06.nsone.net
dns3.p06.nsone.net
dns4.p06.nsone.netProblem: google domain emails
Using netlify’s custom dns will stop any email forwarding you want set up in google domains. To get back the email forwarding functionality, you need to add the relevant MX records to netlify. The records are given here and are as follows:
| Name/Host/Alias | Type | Time-to-live (TTL) (seconds) | Priority | Value/Answer/Destination |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blank or @ | MX | 3600 | 5 | gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com |
| Blank or @ | MX | 3600 | 10 | alt1.gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com |
| Blank or @ | MX | 3600 | 20 | alt2.gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com |
| Blank or @ | MX | 3600 | 30 | alt3.gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com |
| Blank or @ | MX | 3600 | 40 | alt4.gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com |
To add these records, click on site -> domain settings -> Netlify DNS -> add new record.
Once you have completelted this, your email forwarding should work as though the site was hosted on google domains.