"Theme file compilation failed" error upon quarto render and _quarto.yml file

[nmolnar-northeastern]

Description

Hi everyone,

I'm new to quarto, so thank you for your patience in advance.
I'm on macOS sequoia 15.4 and am doing most of my quarto work through Rstudio 2023.06.1+524, R version 4.3.1.

I'm trying to build a quarto website and am running into "ERROR: Theme file compilation failed:" whenever I try to render my .qmd files. I created a basic website from running quarto create-project new-test-site --type website in my terminal. This created a directory with four files: about.qmd, index.qmd, styles.css, and _quarto.yml. These files are unchanged from their defaults:

---
title: "About"
---

About this site

for exanmple. The _quarto.yml file is set up as follows:

project:
  type: website

website:
  title: "new-test-site"
  navbar:
    left:
      - href: index.qmd
        text: Home
      - about.qmd

format:
  html:
    theme:
      - cosmo
      - brand
    css: styles.css
    toc: true

Whenever I try to render my qmd files (either through the RStudio interface or though terminal using quarto render) I get the following error "ERROR: Theme file compilation failed." I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling quarto, as well as clearing the quarto cache on my computer, but nothing has worked. I have run quarto check and seen no errors with my installation each time.

However, when I delete the _quarto.yml file, I can render my .qmd files no problem. Similarly, when I download .qmd files from Quarto's tutorial page, I can render these files. This leads me to believe somehthing about the existence of the _quarto.yml file is preventing me from rendering my .qmd files. This is a problem as I have learned that _quarto.yml files are integral to bulding Quarto websites.

What should I do here? Has anyone run into this problem before?

[mcanouil]

Could you provide the output (as markdown code block) of quarto check?

quarto create-project new-test-site --type website

I don't know where you found the command to create a website, but it's a very old outdated one.

The command is quarto create project website.
See the documentation https://quarto.org/docs/websites/

[nmolnar-northeastern]

Oops - thought I had done it correctly, but re-ran the commands and got a more detailed message, included below.

Quarto version: 1.7.29
Render: Using current directory (/Users/nichos-northeastern/Documents/Northeastern/Protocol_Website/4:30_ghpages_test/macos-intel-quarto) as implicit input
projectContext: Found Quarto project in /Users/nichos-northeastern/Documents/Northeastern/Protocol_Website/4:30_ghpages_test/macos-intel-quarto
[1/4] posts/post-with-code/index.qmd
Loaded deno-dom-native
Creating SassCache at /Users/nichos-northeastern/Documents/Northeastern/Protocol_Website/4:30_ghpages_test/macos-intel-quarto/.quarto/quarto-session-temp2aa56953fa039746/sass
Returning SassCache at /Users/nichos-northeastern/Documents/Northeastern/Protocol_Website/4:30_ghpages_test/macos-intel-quarto/.quarto/quarto-session-temp2aa56953fa039746/sass
SassCache.getOrSet(...)
SassCache.getFromHash(hash=33e63392dc444bae4f3db36c73ac7eda, inputHash=b5febc8b9cd003c969c389f7394a6780, force=undefined)
  cache miss
  cache miss, setting
SassCache.setFromHash(33e63392dc444bae4f3db36c73ac7eda, b5febc8b9cd003c969c389f7394a6780), ...
[execProcess] /Applications/quarto/bin/tools/x86_64/dart-sass/sass /Users/nichos-northeastern/Documents/Northeastern/Protocol_Website/4:30_ghpages_test/macos-intel-quarto/.quarto/quarto-session-temp2aa56953fa039746/5e88b86a7e8a78ef.scss /Users/nichos-northeastern/Documents/Northeastern/Protocol_Website/4:30_ghpages_test/macos-intel-quarto/.quarto/quarto-session-temp2aa56953fa039746/sass/33e63392dc444bae4f3db36c73ac7eda.css --style compressed --quiet --load-path=/Applications/quarto/share/formats/html/bootstrap/dist/scss --load-path=/Applications/quarto/share/formats/html/bslib/bslib-scss
[execProcess] Success: false, code: 64
[DART path]   : /Applications/quarto/bin/tools/x86_64/dart-sass/sass
[DART args]   : /Users/nichos-northeastern/Documents/Northeastern/Protocol_Website/4:30_ghpages_test/macos-intel-quarto/.quarto/quarto-session-temp2aa56953fa039746/5e88b86a7e8a78ef.scss /Users/nichos-northeastern/Documents/Northeastern/Protocol_Website/4:30_ghpages_test/macos-intel-quarto/.quarto/quarto-session-temp2aa56953fa039746/sass/33e63392dc444bae4f3db36c73ac7eda.css --style compressed --quiet --load-path=/Applications/quarto/share/formats/html/bootstrap/dist/scss --load-path=/Applications/quarto/share/formats/html/bslib/bslib-scss
[DART stdout] : Duplicate source "/Users/nichos-northeastern/Documents/Northeastern/Protocol_Website/4".

Usage: sass <input.scss> [output.css]
       sass <input.scss>:<output.css> <input/>:<output/> <dir/>

━━━ Input and Output ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    --[no-]stdin               Read the stylesheet from stdin.
    --[no-]indented            Use the indented syntax for input from stdin.
-I, --load-path=<PATH>         A path to use when resolving imports.
                               May be passed multiple times.
-p, --pkg-importer=<TYPE>      Built-in importer(s) to use for pkg: URLs.

          [node]               Load files like Node.js package resolution.

-s, --style=<NAME>             Output style.
                               [expanded (default), compressed]
    --[no-]charset             Emit a @charset or BOM for CSS with non-ASCII characters.
                               (defaults to on)
    --[no-]error-css           When an error occurs, emit a stylesheet describing it.
                               Defaults to true when compiling to a file.
    --update                   Only compile out-of-date stylesheets.

━━━ Source Maps ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    --[no-]source-map          Whether to generate source maps.
                               (defaults to on)
    --source-map-urls          How to link from source maps to source files.
                               [relative (default), absolute]
    --[no-]embed-sources       Embed source file contents in source maps.
    --[no-]embed-source-map    Embed source map contents in CSS.

━━━ Warnings ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
-q, --[no-]quiet               Don't print warnings.
    --[no-]quiet-deps          Don't print compiler warnings from dependencies.
                               Stylesheets imported through load paths count as dependencies.
    --[no-]verbose             Print all deprecation warnings even when they're repetitive.
    --fatal-deprecation        Deprecations to treat as errors. You may also pass a Sass
                               version to include any behavior deprecated in or before it.
                               See https://sass-lang.com/documentation/breaking-changes for 
                               a complete list.
    --silence-deprecation      Deprecations to ignore.
    --future-deprecation       Opt in to a deprecation early.

━━━ Other ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
-w, --watch                    Watch stylesheets and recompile when they change.
    --[no-]poll                Manually check for changes rather than using a native watcher.
                               Only valid with --watch.
    --[no-]stop-on-error       Don't compile more files once an error is encountered.
-i, --interactive              Run an interactive SassScript shell.
-c, --[no-]color               Whether to use terminal colors for messages.
    --[no-]unicode             Whether to use Unicode characters for messages.
    --[no-]trace               Print full Dart stack traces for exceptions.
-h, --help                     Print this usage information.
    --version                  Print the version of Dart Sass.

[DART stderr] : 
[NotebookContext]: Starting Cleanup
ERROR: Theme file compilation failed:



Stack trace:
    at dartCommand (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:43844:15)
    at eventLoopTick (ext:core/01_core.js:175:7)
    at async dartCompile (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:43806:5)
    at async file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:51444:13
    at async SassCache.setFromHash (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:43895:13)
    at async compileSass (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:51277:21)
    at async resolveSassBundles (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:73914:23)
    at async resolveExtras (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:78529:18)
    at async runPandoc (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:78053:24)
    at async renderPandoc (file:///Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.js:79499:26)

[mcanouil]

Did you nest Quarto projects into one another?
The paths are very weird, especially the 4:30_ghpages_test.

[cscheid]

I'm pretty sure I know what it is. I don't know whose fault it is, but it's the : in your path.

[cscheid]

It looks like sass doesn't like colons in path specifiers, look at the usage pattern:

Usage: sass <input.scss> [output.css]
       sass <input.scss>:<output.css> <input/>:<output/> <dir/>

[cscheid]

Yup, I can repro locally.

[nmolnar-northeastern]

Just tried it on my end. Works fine now!

[nmolnar-northeastern]

Thank you both so much for your patience on this. I'll make sure no colons are used in folder names in the future!

[mcanouil]

Note that using punctuations is really not advisable in paths and that is not limited to Quarto.
You should keep it to alphanumeric, underscores, and dashes.