How to Share a Quarto or R Markdown Report as a Link

Rendering is the easy part. You run quarto render or knit the .Rmd, you get a polished HTML report, and then you have to get it to somebody. The standard options each fall down somewhere. RPubs is free and public, which rules out client work. Posit Connect does access control properly and is an enterprise product. GitHub Pages means a repo and a build step for one document. SharePoint tends to eat the navigation and the images. Here is how to share a Quarto or R Markdown report as a link without any of that.

Render to one self-contained file

Quarto, in your YAML header:

format:
  html:
    embed-resources: true

R Markdown:

output:
  html_document:
    self_contained: true

Both fold the CSS, the JavaScript and the figures into a single .html. That matters because a report rendered without it comes with a sidecar _files/ folder, and the moment the document travels on its own the plots disappear. One file is also exactly what you need for the next step.

Share it in three steps

1. Render with resources embedded.
2. Open ShareMyPage, create a new page, and upload the HTML.
3. Choose who can see it, then send the link.

Re-render next month and replace the page, and the link stays the same. Nobody has to be told to use the new one.

The private version, which is the hard one

Most reports worth sending are not public. This is the gap in the usual list:

• Password protected for a client deliverable, where the recipient should not need an account of any kind.
• Workspace for internal analysis, visible to colleagues and nobody else.
• Public when you actually want it found and cited.

Interactive output survives. A leaflet map, a DT table or a plotly chart carries its own JavaScript inside the embedded file, and the page runs it in a sandbox, so the report behaves the way it did locally.

Why a link rather than the file

An HTML attachment is awkward on a phone, gets flagged by some mail filters, and immediately becomes a copy with no version. A link previews properly when pasted into Slack or an email, opens on anything, and points at the current render. For a recurring report, that difference compounds: one URL in a calendar invite beats twelve attachments in a thread.

If the report goes to a client, see password-protecting a shared page. If it is a deliverable rather than a document, sending a proposal as a web page covers the same ground.

Ready to send your next report as a link? Create a page on ShareMyPage and upload the rendered HTML.