Environment Variables

Variables Quarto inspects

These are variables that you can set to control how Quarto renders documents. For example, you can set them explicitly before running quarto render:

Terminal

export QUARTO_R=/opt/R/4.2.3/bin
quarto render

You can read about other ways to set environment variables in Quarto Projects in Environment Variables.

Variable	Description
QUARTO_R	Explicit path to the version of Rscript to be used by the knitr engine and quarto run *.R command.
QUARTO_PYTHON	Explicit path to the version of python to be used by the jupyter engine and quarto run *.py command.
QUARTO_JULIA	Explicit path to the version of julia to be used by the julia engine.
QUARTO_VERSION_REQUIREMENT	A semver string describing the Quarto version requested by the environment. If this check fails, Quarto will not run.
QUARTO_KNITR_RSCRIPT_ARGS	Comma separated list of command line argument to pass to Rscript started by Quarto when rendering with knitr engine, e.g. QUARTO_KNITR_RSCRIPT_ARGS="--no-init-file,--max-connections=258"
QUARTO_TEXLIVE_BINPATH	Explicit path to the TeX Live binaries to be passed to tlmgr option sys_bin used when setting tlmgr and related to PATH using tlmgr add path . By default, Quarto looks in known places.
QUARTO_CHROMIUM	Explicit path to binary to use for chrome headless. Quarto uses Chrome Devtools Protocol to do screenshot of HTML diagrams for PDF insertion. The binary must be compatible with this protocol. (e.g. Chrome, Chromium, Chrome Headless Shell, Edge, …)
QUARTO_CHROMIUM_HEADLESS_MODE	Used for adaption of the --headless mode used with QUARTO_CHROMIUM binary. Set to "none" for --headless , or to "old" or "new" to pass as argument, e.g. --headless=<QUARTO_CHROMIUM_HEADLESS_MODE> . Quarto 1.6 sets "old" as default, which works from Chrome 112 to 131.

Variables Quarto sets

These variables are set by Quarto you can query them. For example, you can query them in an executable code cell:

R

Sys.getenv("QUARTO_DOCUMENT_PATH")

Python

import os
print(os.environ["QUARTO_DOCUMENT_PATH"])

Julia

ENV["QUARTO_DOCUMENT_PATH"]

Variable	Description
QUARTO_PROJECT_ROOT	Root of the project, or the directory of the file if not in project mode
QUARTO_DOCUMENT_PATH	Directory of the document being rendered
QUARTO_PROFILE	Profile used, e.g QUARTO_PROFILE=advanced,production for quarto render --profile advanced,production
QUARTO_FIG_WIDTH and QUARTO_FIG_HEIGHT	Values for fig-width and fig-height as set in the document metadata
QUARTO_RUN_NO_NETWORK	When true, Quarto project scripts written in TypeScript won’t be allowed to use the network to download sources. In this setting, those scripts will not have access to the standard library.