🪴 Quartz 4.0

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Configuration

Apr 28, 20245 min read

Quartz is meant to be extremely configurable, even if you don’t know any coding. Most of the configuration you should need can be done by just editing quartz.config.ts or changing the layout in quartz.layout.ts.

Tip

If you edit Quartz configuration using a text-editor that has TypeScript language support like VSCode, it will warn you when you you’ve made an error in your configuration, helping you avoid configuration mistakes!

The configuration of Quartz can be broken down into two main parts:

quartz.config.ts
const config: QuartzConfig = {
  configuration: { ... },
  plugins: { ... },
}

General Configuration

This part of the configuration concerns anything that can affect the whole site. The following is a list breaking down all the things you can configure:

  • pageTitle: title of the site. This is also used when generating the RSS Feed for your site.
  • enableSPA: whether to enable SPA Routing on your site.
  • enablePopovers: whether to enable popover previews on your site.
  • analytics: what to use for analytics on your site. Values can be
    • null: don’t use analytics;
    • { provider: 'google', tagId: '<your-google-tag>' }: use Google Analytics;
    • { provider: 'plausible' } (managed) or { provider: 'plausible', host: '<your-plausible-host>' } (self-hosted): use Plausible;
    • { provider: 'umami', host: '<your-umami-host>', websiteId: '<your-umami-website-id>' }: use Umami;
    • { provider: 'goatcounter', websiteId: 'my-goatcounter-id' } (managed) or { provider: 'goatcounter', websiteId: 'my-goatcounter-id', host: 'my-goatcounter-domain.com', scriptSrc: 'https://my-url.to/counter.js' } (self-hosted) use GoatCounter
    • { provider: 'posthog', apiKey: '<your-posthog-project-apiKey>', host: '<your-posthog-host>' }: use Posthog;
  • locale: used for i18n and date formatting
  • baseUrl: this is used for sitemaps and RSS feeds that require an absolute URL to know where the canonical ‘home’ of your site lives. This is normally the deployed URL of your site (e.g. quartz.jzhao.xyz for this site). Do not include the protocol (i.e. https://) or any leading or trailing slashes.
    • This should also include the subpath if you are hosting on GitHub pages without a custom domain. For example, if my repository is jackyzha0/quartz, GitHub pages would deploy to https://jackyzha0.github.io/quartz and the baseUrl would be jackyzha0.github.io/quartz.
    • Note that Quartz 4 will avoid using this as much as possible and use relative URLs whenever it can to make sure your site works no matter where you end up actually deploying it.
  • ignorePatterns: a list of glob patterns that Quartz should ignore and not search through when looking for files inside the content folder. See private pages for more details.
  • defaultDateType: whether to use created, modified, or published as the default date to display on pages and page listings.
  • theme: configure how the site looks.
    • cdnCaching: If true (default), use Google CDN to cache the fonts. This will generally will be faster. Disable (false) this if you want Quartz to download the fonts to be self-contained.
    • typography: what fonts to use. Any font available on Google Fonts works here.
      • header: Font to use for headers
      • code: Font for inline and block quotes.
      • body: Font for everything
    • colors: controls the theming of the site.
      • light: page background
      • lightgray: borders
      • gray: graph links, heavier borders
      • darkgray: body text
      • dark: header text and icons
      • secondary: link colour, current graph node
      • tertiary: hover states and visited graph nodes
      • highlight: internal link background, highlighted text, highlighted lines of code

Plugins

You can think of Quartz plugins as a series of transformations over content.

quartz.config.ts
plugins: {
  transformers: [...],
  filters: [...],
  emitters: [...],
}
  • Transformers map over content (e.g. parsing frontmatter, generating a description)
  • Filters filter content (e.g. filtering out drafts)
  • Emitters reduce over content (e.g. creating an RSS feed or pages that list all files with a specific tag)

You can customize the behaviour of Quartz by adding, removing and reordering plugins in the transformers, filters and emitters fields.

Note

Each node is modified by every transformer in order. Some transformers are position sensitive, so you may need to pay particular attention to whether they need to come before or after certain other plugins.

You should take care to add the plugin to the right entry corresponding to its plugin type. For example, to add the ExplicitPublish plugin (a Filter), you would add the following line:

quartz.config.ts
filters: [
  ...
  Plugin.ExplicitPublish(),
  ...
],

To remove a plugin, you should remove all occurrences of it in the quartz.config.ts.

To customize plugins further, some plugins may also have their own configuration settings that you can pass in. If you do not pass in a configuration, the plugin will use its default settings.

For example, the Latex plugin allows you to pass in a field specifying the renderEngine to choose between Katex and MathJax.

quartz.config.ts
transformers: [
  Plugin.FrontMatter(), // use default options
  Plugin.Latex({ renderEngine: "katex" }), // set some custom options
]

Some plugins are included by default in the quartz.config.ts, but there are more available.

You can see a list of all plugins and their configuration options here.

If you’d like to make your own plugins, see the making custom plugins guide.

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