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Sidebar auto: matched no documents

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A sidebar auto: entry expanded against the project index but matched no documents.

Q-13-6 — Sidebar auto: Matched No Documents

A sidebar auto: entry expanded against the project index but matched no documents.

What this means

A sidebar auto: entry asks Quarto to fill the sidebar with every document matching a path or glob — auto: posts for everything under posts/, auto: "**/*.qmd" for every .qmd in the project, and so on. This warning fires when the expansion runs against a real project index but finds nothing. The sidebar still renders; the auto: entry contributes no items.

You may see this without having written auto:

Writing a sidebar’s contents: as a single string is shorthand for auto:. These two are the same configuration:

website:
  sidebar:
    contents: guides
website:
  sidebar:
    contents:
      - auto: guides

So a mistyped directory name in the short form reports this auto: warning even though the word never appears in your _quarto.yml. The shorthand applies only when contents: is a single string — entries in a contents: list are ordinary links, not auto: specs.

Why this happens

Common causes:

  • The path or glob does not match any project file. A typo, an off-by-one in a glob, or a directory that exists but is empty.
  • The directory holds only excluded files — underscore- prefixed names, hidden directories, or files filtered out by project.render.
  • The directory holds no documents Quarto renders. A directory is only recognized as one when the project index contains at least one document beneath it. A directory of images or data files, with no .qmd alongside them, matches nothing and reports this warning.

How to fix

Confirm the path or glob points where you expect. From the shell, expanding the same pattern (ls posts/*.qmd) shows what Quarto sees — if the listing is empty there, fix the glob; if files appear but Quarto still reports none, check the project’s exclusion rules.