How to apply 'template' YAML to new Quarto documents?

[daranzolin]

I have an RStudio project template that creates a Quarto document using system('quarto create-project {report_dir}'). I then want to overwrite the YAML header with my preferred defaults. How do I do this? Create a quarto template? Use the ymlthis package?

[cderv]

Create a quarto template?

Using starter template is probably the official quarto way for such usage.
Creating custom project type is adding another level to embed the custom configuration in a specific extension format.

Hope this helps

[jimjam-slam]

quarto use template has a --no-prompt option that I think is probably designed for interactive use! This might be what you're looking for, @daranzolin 😁

[daranzolin]

Thanks @jimjam-slam, I think that might work! Is there an option to specify the directory the files will be downloaded into? When I try to execute the command within my (new) project directory I get:

ERROR: Attempting to use a template with '--no-prompt' in a non-empty directory.'

[jimjam-slam]

Mmmm! When you run the command without --no-prompt, it asks you whether you'd like to use a subdirectory if the current directory is empty. If you say yes, you're prompted for the subdirectory name (to which it deposits the template), and if you say no, it uses the current directory. If the current directory isn't empty, it doesn't give you the option of using the current directory, skipping straight to the choice of subdirectory name.

My inference from all this is that if you use --no-prompt, you're expected to create an empty directory for the command to run in yourself. Maybe that means running something like:

rm -rf ./templatefolder/* && \
  mkdir -p ./templatefolder && \
  cd templatefolder && \
  quarto use template repo/templatename --no-prompt

[daranzolin]

I think that's exactly right, in my initialize_project() function I ended up doing:

dir.create(file.path(path, "Report"))
setwd(file.path(path, "Report"))
system("quarto use template repo/templatename --no-prompt")

Thanks!

[cderv]

Oh I see. Indeed this is a bit different. We'll add such function in quarto-r soon. First work on this was : quarto-dev/quarto-r#45

Update to quarto-r should happen soon.