How to contribute

Published

2026-10-23

Install Quarto

The install should update your path and Quarto to run from any command terminal. Details about installiung and running Quarto can be found on the Quarto Get Started page.

Change to the project directory (if using GitHub Desktop, select “Repository - Open in Command prompt”, or Ctrl+\)

Run the “Quarto preview” command to start a live preview session that will render the updated pages as you edit. Some changes may not be automatically rendered by the preview, and you may need to exit (type Ctrl-c in the command window) and then restart the preview.

The site will be served locally by Quarto and should open a browser session at: http://localhost:xxxx/, with a default port in the range of 3000-8000 being assigned. The system console will indicate the port that is selected.

The site may need to be re-built (run “Quarto render”) after edits are complete. This is usually only needed prior to deploying a site to the server.

Publishing site

Quarto provides several methods to publish a website. The Alaska Region Metadata Guide GitHub repositoty is configured to ignore the /docs directory. The site is deployed the gh-pages branch using the Quarto publish command. (Attempting to render GitHub pages from the /docs directory often results in numerous conflicts if the site is edited my multiple individuals.)

Style guide

This metadata guide should be authored using the same style guidelines that apply to the Alaska Region Data Management Guide, unless exceptions are listed below.