Private Pages

There may be some notes you want to avoid publishing as a website. Quartz supports this through two mechanisms which can be used in conjunction:

Filter Plugins

Filter plugins are plugins that filter out content based off of certain criteria. By default, Quartz’s built-in draft handling filters out any note that has draft: true in the frontmatter. Set configuration.drafts.publish: true to publish drafts anyway (e.g. for a preview deployment).

If you’d like to only publish a select number of notes, you can instead use ExplicitPublish which will filter out all notes except for any that have publish: true in the frontmatter. It is in the default quartz.config.yaml but disabled; set enabled: true on its entry.

To publish a page but keep it out of listings (explorer, search, graph, backlinks, RSS, sitemap, folder and tag pages), add unlisted: true to its frontmatter. This is handled by UnlistedPages, which is enabled by default. The page is still reachable by its URL.

Bases, canvases and Excalidraw drawings follow the same filters. A drawing stored as Markdown has frontmatter of its own. A .base or .canvas file has none: with ExplicitPublish it is published when a published note links to it, and with encrypted pages it is encrypted with the password of the encrypted note that links to it.

Warning

By default (publishAssets: "all"), all non-markdown files are emitted and available publicly in the final build, regardless of the filter plugin used. This includes files such as images, voice recordings, PDFs, etc.

Set publishAssets: "referenced" in the configuration to copy only the files that published pages link to or embed, so that files only used by unpublished notes stay private.

ignorePatterns

This is a field in quartz.config.yaml under the main configuration which allows you to specify a list of patterns to effectively exclude from parsing all together. Any valid fast-glob pattern works here.

Note

Bash’s glob syntax is slightly different from fast-glob’s and using bash’s syntax may lead to unexpected results.

Common examples include:

• some/folder: exclude the entire of some/folder
• *.md: exclude all files with a .md extension
• !(*.md) exclude all files that don’t have a .md extension. Note that negations must parenthesize the rest of the pattern!
• **/private: exclude any files or folders named private at any level of nesting

Warning

Marking something as private via either a plugin or through the ignorePatterns pattern will only prevent a page from being included in the final built site. If your GitHub repository is public, also be sure to include an ignore for those in the .gitignore of your Quartz. See the git documentation for more information.