Fastpages (deprecated)
Jupyter notebook → Jekyll blog. fast.ai's tool. Deprecated, replaced by Quarto / Nikola.
VISIT FASTPAGES (DEPRECATED)Key takeaway: Do not start anything here. Fastpages was deprecated by fast.ai in favour of Quarto, and this page exists so that anyone maintaining an old notebook blog knows where to go. If you are publishing Jupyter notebooks as a site today, Quarto is the direct successor and does the same job on an actively developed toolchain.
Quick facts
- LanguagePython
- CategoryPython
- LicenseApache-2.0
- Created2020
- GitHub stars3.6k
- Statusarchived
Templating: Jupyter Markdown
What it is
Fastpages was fast.ai's tool to convert Jupyter notebooks into a Jekyll blog. Deprecated in 2022 in favour of Quarto. Listed for completeness.
Best for
- Existing Fastpages sites only
When not to pick it
For new projects pick Quarto or a notebook-aware modern SSG.
My take
Deprecated. Migrate when you replatform.
What it did, and why the model broke
Fastpages solved a real problem: publishing Jupyter notebooks as blog posts with no local toolchain at all. You pushed a notebook to a GitHub repository, a GitHub Action converted it, and Jekyll built a site with the outputs, plots, and code cells intact. For researchers and students it removed every remaining excuse not to publish. The weakness was structural. The whole thing was a chain of pinned dependencies inside someone else's CI, spanning notebook conversion, Jekyll, Ruby gems, and the Action runner image. When any link moved, builds failed in ways the average user could not debug, and the maintenance burden landed on a team whose actual product was a deep learning library. Retiring it was the right call even though it stranded a lot of blogs that had been working fine.
Getting off it without losing your URLs
The migration target is Quarto, which renders notebook files directly rather than converting them through a shim, and supports the same mixture of prose, code, and executed output. Practically: move your notebooks into a Quarto project, translate the front matter fields, and configure output paths so published URLs match the old Jekyll permalinks exactly. Do that before you cut over, because a notebook blog's inbound links are usually its entire value. Anything you cannot match, redirect with a permanent 301 rather than a temporary one, and keep the mapping in version control alongside the site. Check image and plot output paths carefully, since that is where most conversions quietly lose assets. If you would rather not adopt Quarto, any generator can host pre-exported HTML, but you lose re-execution and the ability to update a post by rerunning it.
Frequently asked questions
Is Fastpages still supported?
No. It was deprecated in 2022 and users were pointed to Quarto. The repository remains available for reference, but there is no ongoing development and the GitHub Actions pipeline it depends on degrades as its dependencies move. Existing sites may still build; nothing new should be started on it.
What replaced Fastpages?
Quarto, from Posit. It publishes Jupyter notebooks, R Markdown, and plain Markdown into websites, books, and papers, executes code at render time, and is actively developed with a much broader remit. It covers everything Fastpages did and considerably more, including cross-references, citations, and multiple output formats from one source.
How do I migrate a Fastpages blog?
Move the notebooks into a Quarto project, translate the front matter, and set output paths to reproduce your existing permalink structure. Verify against a crawl of the live site, then add permanent 301 redirects for anything that cannot be matched exactly. Do this before launch, since inbound links are usually the site's main asset.
Links
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If Fastpages (deprecated) is your pick, the next conversation is short
The 30-min call is where your project gets a real architecture, an SEO transport plan, and a price range you can take to your team. Describe your site, your timeline, your existing content. I tell you whether Fastpages (deprecated) is genuinely the right call for you, and what the build actually looks like.