Migrate from fastpages to quarto preserving git history

Published

September 27, 2022

Most of my blog posts are in Markdown…however, there are cases where plotting and code are very important, and nothing beats a Jupyter Notebook for that.

This blog was based on fastpages, a static blog generator by fast.ai. Unfortunately they are discontinuing it and they recommended to migrate to Quarto, so here we are.

Hamel Husain wrote a great tutorial on how to migrate from Fastpages to Quarto (and saved me so much work):

https://nbdev.fast.ai/tutorials/blogging.html#migrating-from-fastpages

Following I describe a couple of tips that were useful for my migration.

Preserve git history

I wanted to keep the commit history of my blog, so I replaced this step:

cp -r ../blog/_notebooks/* posts
cp -r ../blog/_posts/* posts

with a more complicated procedure based on git filter-branch. git expertise recommended, continue at your own risk.

I was inspired by this tutorial about git, even if I simplified a bit the procedure.

After we initialize the website/blog based on quarto, we commit it to the main branch of the repository (for the new blog).

  • In the same repository we create another branch which points to the old fastpages-powered blog:
git remote add old git@github.com:you/yourfastpagesrepo.git
git fetch old
git checkout -b oldposts old/master
  • Then we only keep the history of the _posts folder

    git filter-branch –subdirectory-filter _posts – –all

  • Finally we move it into a folder

    mkdir oldposts mv * oldposts git add . git commit -m “move posts into folder”

  • Now we can merge it back into the main branch

git checkout main
git merge oldposts --allow-unrelated-histories
git mv oldposts/* posts/
  • If necessary, repeat this step with the _notebooks folder

No categories in URL

In my old blog I didn’t have categories in my URL, so the aliases generated by nbdev_migrate were wrong.

I modified migrate.py in my nbdev install.

In _fp_convert, I modified the line about aliases into:

fm['aliases'] = [f'{fs'}]

Screenshots of the old blog

Sometimes I get nostalgic.

Screenshot of old blog Screenshot of old blog Screenshot of old blog