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Engine Runtime Not Found

engine
An execution engine needs an external runtime (e.g. Julia, R, or Jupyter) that could not be found on this machine.

Q-18-3 — Engine Runtime Not Found

An execution engine needs an external runtime (e.g. Julia, R, or Jupyter) that could not be found on this machine, so the render could not continue.

What this means

Some engines are Quarto integrations for a language runtime that lives outside Quarto itself — Julia, R (via knitr), or a Jupyter kernel. The engine extension is present and resolves correctly, but when Quarto tried to launch the runtime it needs, that runtime was not on PATH.

This is a missing local dependency, not a problem in your document: the same document renders fine on a machine where the runtime is installed.

Why this happens

  • The runtime (e.g. julia, Rscript, jupyter) is not installed.
  • The runtime is installed but not on the PATH Quarto sees — for example an IDE or CI environment with a different PATH than an interactive shell.
  • An environment variable that names a specific runtime executable (for example QUARTO_JULIA) points at a path that does not exist.

How to fix

The message names both the engine and the runtime it could not find.

  1. Install the named runtime, or make sure it is on PATH in the environment Quarto runs in.
  2. If you use an override environment variable to point at a specific executable, confirm that path is correct.
  3. Re-run the render once the runtime is available.