Trying out Quarto on macOS#

I decided to try out Quarto, the new notebook/markdown/publishing system built on Pandoc.

I followed their Get started guide and downloaded and installed the macOS installer.

Having run the installer, quarto --help showed that I had the CLI command installed.

Setting up VS Code and solving ImportErrors#

Next I installed the Quarto extension for VS Code by clicking the “Install” button on this page: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=quarto.quarto

I started following the tutorial there, which worked… up until the point where I clicked “Render”, when I got this error in the VS Code terminal:

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ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'nbformat'

This looked suspiciously to me like an xkcd 1987 problem: which of the many versions of Python on my computer was Quarto using? And why didn’t that version have the right packages installed?

I figured out which Python was being used by adding this block to the tutorial Markdown file and executing it in VS Code:

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```{python}
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import sys
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print(sys.executable)
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```

This output:

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/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/python3

Now that I knew which Python was being used, I could install the nbformat and later the nbclient packages that the error messages were complaining about:

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/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/python3 -m pip install nbformat nbclient

Having installed those two packages into that particular Python instance, the “Render” button in VS Code worked and gave me a rendered PDF preview.

I filed a bug report about this here: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/issues/1972