Quarto Installation and Setup

Overview

This unit guides you through the installation and initial setup of Quarto. You will learn how to install Quarto and make sure it’s up and running.

Goals

  • Successfully install Quarto on your system.

Reading

Installing Quarto

Visit the Get started page on the Quarto website to download and install Quarto.

Install it like you would any other software. If you don’t have administrator rights to your computer, choose the user installation, which hopefully will work without admin rights. If not, you might need to have your admin install Quarto for you.

Testing/using Quarto

Quarto is a command-line tool. That means you run it from a terminal (Mac/Linux) or command prompt (Windows). We will essentially always call it from within Positron.

But to test it, open a terminal/command prompt. If you are on Windows, look for the “Command Prompt” or “Terminal” application and open it. If you are on a Mac, open the “Terminal” application. At the > symbol, type the following:

quarto --version

If the install worked, you should see it show the version of the software you just downloaded and installed.

If you ever need to see what commands you can use with Quarto, type:

quarto --help

Though to be honest, what you get is not that informative. It’s just a quick way to look up syntax if you forgot it. To learn in detail what each of these commands do, refer to the Quarto website and its documentation.

Quarto configuration

Quarto interacts with a lot of other tools. Not all are needed, depending on what you want to do. To see this list of tools and if they are available on your system, type this into the console/terminal:

quarto check

If you want to create PDF documents – which is often very useful – you will need to install a TeX distribution. Quarto recommends TinyTeX for this. You can install it by typing the following command into the console:

quarto install tinytex

If you are already familiar with TeX distributions and have a preferred one, you can also use that one. See the Quarto documentation on PDF output for more details.

Summary

In this unit, you learned how to install Quarto and perform initial setup tasks. You also learned how to install a TeX distribution such as TinyTeX to enable PDF output generation.

Further Resources

Test yourself

Which command checks the installed Quarto version?

quarto --version prints the installed Quarto version if the tool is available.

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What does the command quarto check do?

quarto check reports on external tools Quarto can integrate with on your system.

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Why would you install TinyTeX when using Quarto?

Quarto needs a TeX distribution for PDF output, and TinyTeX is a recommended option.

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Practice

There’s nothing else to practice for now. We hope the install worked and you verified by trying the commands above.