Dashboard Deployment

Overview

There are a wide variety of ways to deploy dashboards created using Quarto. The mechanics of deployment are different depending on whether you are publishing a Static Dashboard (with no server dependencies) or a Shiny Dashboard. Both scenarios are covered in detail below.

Static Dashboards

If you are deploying a static dashboard (i.e. not using Shiny for interactivity) then you can publish dashboards to any web server. Quarto includes a quarto publish command to make it easy to publish to a few popular services as well as automate publishing via Continuous Integration (CI).

To get started, review the documentation for using one of the following publishing services:

Destination	Description
Quarto Pub	Publishing service for Quarto documents, websites, and books. Use Quarto Pub when you want a free, easy to use service for publicly available content.
GitHub Pages	Publish content based on source code managed within a GitHub repository. Use GitHub Pages when the source code for your document or site is hosted on GitHub.
Posit Connect	Publishing platform for secure sharing of data products within an organization. Use Posit Connect when you want to publish content within an organization rather than on the public internet.
Posit Cloud	Create data projects and publish results from your web browser. Use Posit Cloud when you want to organize all your static documents and interactive applications in one place.
Netlify	Professional web publishing platform. Use Netlify when you want support for custom domains, authentication, previewing branches, and other more advanced capabilities.
Confluence	Publishing platform for supporting team collaboration. Use Confluence to share documents in team Spaces.
Hugging Face Spaces	Publishing platform specializing in learning models and datasets. Use Hugging Face Spaces when you want to share Quarto documents together with associated machine learning models and/or datasets.
Other Services	Content rendered with Quarto uses standard formats (HTML, PDFs, MS Word, etc.) that can be published anywhere. Use this if none of the methods above meets your requirements.

If you don’t know which to choose, try Quarto Pub which is a free service for publicly available content. If you are publishing to a destination not listed above, choose Other Services.

These articles cover both straightforward direct publishing as well as Continuous Integration (CI) publishing with GitHub Actions. If you want to publish using CI and aren’t using GitHub Actions, the article on Publishing with CI provides additional details and documentation.

Shiny Dashboards

Dashboards that use Shiny for Python or Shiny for R are web applications that require a server for deployment (so they can’t just be deployed to a generic web host). Deployment options for Shiny applications include:

Public hosting services like shinyapps.io and Hugging Face.
Shiny Server (an open-source server developed by the Shiny team).
Posit Connect (an on-premises commercial server product).

Below we’ll cover some deployment basics for Python and R and provide links to additional documentation on using the various available methods.

Shiny for Python

Shiny interactive documents are normal Shiny applications that are created using quarto render. In fact, you don’t need Quarto at all to serve interactive documents, rather, you can just shiny run the application generated by quarto render:

Terminal

quarto render example.qmd
shiny run app.py

Your deployed application will consist of both the HTML document and app.py script generated by quarto render:

example.html
example_files/
app.py

See the following documentation for information on deploying Shiny applications in various environments:

Destination	Description
shinyapps.io	Cloud hosting service
Hugging Face	Cloud hosting service
Shiny Server	Open source application server
Posit Connect	Commerical publishing platform
Other Services	Custom server/hosting environment

You can also deploy interactive Shiny documents in a serverless configuration (where Python runs in the browser via Pyodide). The Retirement Simulation is an example that demonstrates this workflow.

Shiny for R

Quarto Dashboards that use Shiny for R can be deployed using all of the tooling and services available for normal Shiny applications. Shiny for R dashboards are run using the quarto serve command:

Terminal

quarto serve dashboard.qmd

The quarto serve command is supported natively by shinyapps.io, Shiny Server , and Posit Connect. See the in-depth documentation on Shiny for R Deployment for details.