Is there a way to "unit test" a quarto project?

[JosephBARBIERDARNAL]

Description

Perhaps my question isn't very clear, but I'd like to be able to check that my quarto project isn't broken in the same way that we do unit tests in any software project.

For example, I'd like to test that the _quarto.yaml doesn't contain invalid keys/values, that the YAML frontmatter in my .qmd files is correct (whatever that means), and so on. There are probably other things that would be relevant to test, but these are the most intuitively (?) important.

Are there any tools built into the CLI? Or extensions that cover this specific topic? I couldn't find any resources after browsing Google.

[cscheid]

For example, I'd like to test that the _quarto.yaml doesn't contain invalid keys/values, that the YAML frontmatter in my .qmd files is correct (whatever that means), and so on.

Quarto includes a validator, so it won't render unless it considers the YAML valid (for its own notion of valid, of course. It won't be able to catch, eg, typos in author names).

If you want to run these yourself, a good way to do it is to add a pre-render script to your quarto project: https://quarto.org/docs/projects/scripts.html#pre-and-post-render. You can also leverage quarto run and a Makefile if you don't want the tests to be run at every render. Finally, you might want to run quarto inspect in your project, look at the JSON output, and consider incorporating it into your test suite: it has a number of useful things.

[JosephBARBIERDARNAL]

The pre-render is exactly what I had in mind! Thanks also for the other information. I think I've got everything I need now.