Define profiles with an argument?

[andrewheiss]

Starting with v1.2, Quarto supports project profiles that let you customize overall project _quarto.yml files for specific situations, like production vs. development, or basic book vs. advanced book. For instance, these three YAML files define two different versions of a document (here with different authors):

_quarto.yml

project:
  output-dir: _output

profile:
  default: basic

_quarto-basic.yml

author: Basic author

format:
  html:
    output-file: "basic.html"

_quarto-advanced.yml

author: Advanced author

format:
  html:
    output-file: "advanced.html"

testing.qmd

---
title: "Testing"
---

Test.

It's possible to switch profiles either with environment variables…

export QUARTO_PROFILE=advanced
quarto render .

…or a command line switch:

quarto render . --profile advanced

It would be helpful to be able to specify the desired profile(s) in quarto_render() and quarto_preview(). Right now it just uses whatever is set to the default (basic in this example). It could be helpful to control environments in order to create different outputs for multiple profiles. For instance, something like this could be added to a sort of rendering script and generate basic and advanced versions of the document simultaneously:

quarto::quarto_render(".", profile = "basic")  # Create basic.html
quarto::quarto_render(".", profile = "advanced")  # Create advanced.html

An argument like this would also allow wrapper packages like tarchetypes::tar_quarto() to use specific profiles (see ropensci/tarchetypes#139 for a similar issue for adding profile support for {targets})

[cderv]

Definitely - we'll come to updating the package soon and we'll definitely add this, and maybe a way to pass any new args in the future to not be a blocker between quarto versions.

[andrewheiss]

In the meantime, this works as a workaround:

withr::with_envvar(new = c("QUARTO_PROFILE" = "basic"), {
  quarto::quarto_render(".")  # Create basic.html
})

withr::with_envvar(new = c("QUARTO_PROFILE" = "advanced"), {
  quarto::quarto_render(".")  # Create advanced.html
})

[wlandau]

Would it be possible to add a profile argument to quarto_inspect() as well? tarchetypes uses both quarto_render() and quarto_inspect().