Include knitr and rmarkdown in the (full) docker image

[hanslovp-gne]

Description

I am using .qmd files for documentation/tutorials and need knitr and rmarkdown for the knitr engine. The quarto-full image does not come with either of those packages installed. Would it be possible to install those packages in the quarto-full image? I was able to render a .qmd file successfully with a docker image create from this simple Dockerfile:

FROM ghcr.io/quarto-dev/quarto-full:1.9.19

RUN Rscript -e 'install.packages(c("knitr", "rmarkdown"), repos = "http://cran.us.r-project.org/")'

If you think that this is a reasonable request and suggested solution, I can make a pull request with the change. I figure I would need to modify the Dockerfile here.

[mcanouil]

Why not generate the image yourself? As you can see it's pretty simple to install Quarto on whatever base image you want/need.

The goal of the Quarto image is not to provide all possible computing features and dependencies (R, Python, Julia).
It's simply a base image with Quarto CLI to mitigate maintenance burden (look at the whole rocker project architecture which really supports R version and several standard packages).

If you want other images, there are several out there:

• https://github.com/mcanouil/quarto-codespaces
• https://rocker-project.org

Note that this is a duplicate of:

• https://github.com/orgs/quarto-dev/discussions/3374

[cderv]

as the quarto-full image is based on a R build, it would make sense probably to add at least those two requirements 🤔

And maybe we should have a quarto-full-r and a quarto-full-python instead of a quarto-full.

I don't remember the history of those image but the quarto one is only ubuntu with quarto. But quarto-full is based on FROM rstudio/r-base:4.3-focal 🤔 and as tinytex install in addition.

We could rethink those images - they are low maintainance currently.

[mcanouil]

@hanslovp-gne

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[hanslovp-gne]

The goal of the Quarto image is not to provide all possible computing features and dependencies

Understood 👍

Creating an image myself would be an option, but that would likely have to be hosted internally, and I would not be able to share back to the community. I figure anyone else who would like an image that also includes knitr and rmarkdown can use this issue as a reference for building their own image.

Also for reference for other users: I found that the rocker/geospatial:4.5 image contains knitr and rmarkdown:

$ podman run rocker/geospatial:4.5 quarto check
[...]
[✓] Checking R installation...........OK
      Version: 4.5.2
      Path: /usr/local/lib/R
      LibPaths:
        - /usr/local/lib/R/site-library
        - /usr/local/lib/R/library
      knitr: 1.51
      rmarkdown: 2.30
[...]

With the geospatial image, I was able to run quarto render with the knitr engine successfully.