When previewing a project, how to hide the output notebooks (out.ipynb) by prefix'ing the file names with a '.', or redirect them to a different folder?

[rraadd88]

Description

I am previewing a website using this command:

quarto preview index.ipynb

This file embeds outputs from notebooks located in notebooks folder

_quarto.yaml
index.ipynb
notebooks/
  nb1.ipynb
  nb2.ipynb

When previewing, the output .out.ipynb files are stored in this way

_quarto.yaml
index.ipynb
notebooks/
  nb1.ipynb
  nb1.out.ipynb <--
  nb2.ipynb
  nb2.out.ipynb <--

In attempt to control the location of these (redundant) files, I set output-dir in _quarto.yaml.

project:
  type: website
  output-dir: _output/
  render:
  ## ignore
    - "!data/"  
  preview:
    port: 8000
    browser: false
    
website:
  sidebar:
    search: true
    
format:
  html:
    toc: true
notebook-links: false

But this does not have any effect, I suppose because I am previewing not rendering.

Therefore I would like to either

1. Hide those out.ipynb files by adding a '.' prefix. Could output-ext, output-file parameters help in this regard?
   OR
2. Redirect these files to _outputs folder as indicated in the _quarto.yaml.

Could either of these be possible?

---

Quarto 1.4.553 on Ubuntu

[mcanouil]

Could you a share a small "working" reproducible repository which exhibits this?

[rraadd88]

Hi @mcanouil, this is a working reproducible exhibit: https://github.com/rraadd88/test_quarto.git

Good news is that while making this repo, I could find out what was causing the issue. But I still do not have any solution.

The issue - of quarto ignoring the output-dir and therefore *.out.ipynb files flooding into places they should not, - happens when I add render parameter to ignore folder/s. I can turn this issue on/off if I include/exclude these lines in the config:

  render:
  ## ignore
    - "!data/"

To circumvent this issue, I wonder if there is any other way to ignore folders.

Also, if this is not a bug but a feature, a warning to the user would have been very useful IMO.

--
PS: I had to edit my original post to include the render parameters in the config.

[mcanouil]

The issue appears because you only have a negate targets in render.
This is a bug.

The following won't trigger the bug:

  render:
    - index.ipynb
    - "!data/"

This is reported somewhere and I'll add the link when I'll find it again.

[rraadd88]

I just tested your solution. Thank you for your help.
I hope the bug will be fixed in the future versions.

[mcanouil]

The Quarto team is aware of this bug/limitation which is stated in the documentation at https://quarto.org/docs/websites/index.html#render-targets.

You can also use the prefix ! to ignore some files or directories in the ‘render` list. Note that in that case you need to start by specifying everything you do want to render.