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_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.

Variables Quarto sets

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

Sys.getenv("QUARTO_DOCUMENT_PATH")

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

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.