Install extension for user

[JanPalasek]

Is there a possibility to install an extension per-user and not per-project? I would expect something like:

quarto install extension EXTENSION_NAME --user

And then I wouldn't need to install it for every project separately.

[dragonstyle]

There is not- we currently only support installing into a folder or project. We do this largely to try to aide reproducibility - the project folder will ideally contain all the resources required to render the document. We don't currently have a plan to support global per user or per machine installation of extensions.

We currently have a command quarto create - I wonder if it would be useful to somehow extend this with the idea of user defined templates which include project skeletons (with extensions). That would mean you could define some abstract idea of a project with extensions and just do quarto create project <my-cool-project> to configure a directory with everything that is needed to get it up and running...

[andrewpbray]

This could be really handy. I've been building out what amounts to a course website for college classes and it involves some extensions. This would be a great way to encapsulate the key parts of the structure: _quarto.yml, _variables.yml, _extensions, template .qmds, file structure.

[dragonstyle]

As I'm thinking about this, a good proxy for the time being would be creating a repo and using the quarto use template command, which will more or less accomplish this.

quarto use template dragonstyle/my-template

We document this feature primarily as useful to build Journal formats, but what is really happening is that we are automating the placement of files from the repo in a folder (screening out specific known files but otherwise just moving the contents into place as is, including installed extensions, template files, and so on). Worth considering...

https://quarto.org/docs/journals/formats.html

[andrewpbray]

Ah, interesting. I didn't realize that's what was going on under the hood. I'll look into that.