How to change directory for x_cache/ and x_files/ in Quarto Website?

[jmgirard]

I have a quarto website where each main qmd file generates a cache and files directory. This ends up cluttering my main directory. Can I tell quarto (or knitr) to save generate these files in a subdirectory like _cache/?

[cscheid]

That's currently not supported by quarto, unfortunately. We're slowly fixing internal infrastructure issues that will make that easier in the future, but a proper fix for this is quite a ways out yet.

If you are using a quarto website, though, all of those directories should be going in the output of the project (rather than next to the .qmd files), so maybe I'm missing something.

[mcanouil]

Does the _cache directory (from knitr) is tied up to _files in Quarto? At least Quarto is changed the cache path to include file basename into it.

In my small and simple test, the cache is not cleaned up (as expected) but the _files is.

Also the repository is not clean, for example there is the _site directory while Quarto configuration file states the output is in docs. There are also some html files at the root of the repository.
Right now from the repository, it's hard to know where could be the issue.

[cderv]

Not going into the details around tweaking cache.path options but some context are documented in https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/cache-path.html#cache-path

rmarkdown::render() should do the right thing regarding naming, no need to tweak it I believe, unless one want a global cache to speed up rendering. However, maybe Quarto is interfering with this as it handles cache too (https://quarto.org/docs/projects/code-execution.html#cache)

Does the _cache directory (from knitr) is tied up to _files in Quarto?

In R Markdown and knitr they are both linked because when a cache chunk contains plots for example, the files folder is required. SOme context in rstudio/rmarkdown#2408

I'll look into this closer to see how this all works within Quarto.

[cderv]

So I spent some time trying to understand how this all works between R Markdown, Knitr and Quarto

The .html files go to /docs/ along with a copy of _files/ but the _cache/ and _files/ directories remain next to the .qmd.

About this, I think this is directly related to rstudio/rmarkdown#2408 which we could improve. *_files is required for caching, so it is not part of the removed file. It is not returned by rmarkdown::render as part of intermediates_dir. This means Quarto will only copy it to output dir, but not move it. If it were removed the caching would not work because the _files folder would not be recreated.

So Quarto does copy the *_files dir as part of the resourceFiles() search when cache is activated, and will move the *_files dir when cache is not activated as part of renderedFile.supporting processing. (which is a different one)

I believe this is the expected behavior currently for the cache to work.

I have a quarto website where each main qmd file generates a cache and files directory. This ends up cluttering my main directory.

This is indeed the behavior of knitr. We only have a cache.path options, and not a cache.dir options to change where the cache.path auto generated folder is saved. So by default it will be relative to the document.
In bookdown, it does not clutter your root folder because we use a trick to hide the *_cache and *_files folder in a global _bookdown_files folder , and then move them back to root during rendering.
We don't have such behavior in Quarto.

I don't think changing cache.path is really supported by rmarkdown. The *_files folder will not be correctly handled. Maybe an issue in rmarkdown or a rather a feature request to handle cache configure better.

So for now, there is not really a good workaround for the cluttering @jmgirard - except doing something with pre and post render script to do like bookdown maybe. But as @cscheid said we'll probably improve all this in the future.

This is starting to feel like a bug in quarto for me, where I think you're expecting your _*.qmd files to be used only in the context of include targets, but they're both getting rendered and their outputs are not being cleaned up properly...

@cscheid I don't think there is an issue, or I missed it. happy to chat live about this.

[cscheid]

@cscheid I don't think there is an issue, or I missed it. happy to chat live about this.

You've looked at it deeper than I have, and I think your explanation makes sense; I was suspicious of us accidentally rendering the files that are used as include targets (because they have a .qmd extension), but I don't think that's the issue. I trust your expertise on this one.

[cderv]

I was suspicious of us accidentally rendering the files that are used as include targets (because they have a .qmd extension)

Yes we're good on that part. The included file are rendered once included and caching + resources are correctly computed.