Project-wide execution directory not respected

[pat-alt]

This might be related to quarto-dev/quarto-cli#3157: I've noted that specifying the project-wide execution directory has no effect when using the julia engine.

Example

I've added a reproducible example here. You'll notice that in _quarto.yml I specified the project directory as the execution directory. Doing so with the Jupyter kernel for Julia sets the working directory to the project root as expected, but not when using the julia engine.

Motivation

In my experience, setting the execution directory to the project root makes it easier to handle large projects (e.g. when generating package documentation using both Quarto and Documenter.jl). The reason is that in this scenario every .qmd starts from the same working directory, independent of where in the project the file is placed.

Ideal scenario

Ideally, the execution flags would also respect this global option, i.e. if I've specified execute-dir: project in my global _quarto.yml then I can specify the project directory relative to that. Suppose, for example, I have a special environment in my docs/ folder that I want to use as the default environment for all of my .qmd files inside docs/src. Then I would like to be able to simply specify exeflags: ["--project=docs/"] for all of them (so docs/ relative to the root directory as opposed to ../**/docs/ relative to the notebook).

[MichaelHatherly]

Yes, closely related to that upstream issue. What we can do here is support execute-dir within the frontmatter we do receive from the quarto process and execute in the directory provided.

[asinghvi17]

For what it's worth, even when I supply execute-dir in the Quarto front matter on each page, it doesn't seem to apply (using the Julia engine) either.

[MichaelHatherly]

Correct, execute-dir just hasn't been implemented yet anywhere in this package. Probably a relatively straightforward addition though.