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Project render scripts unsupported in this environment

project
The environment cannot run subprocesses, so project.pre-render / project.post-render scripts were skipped.

Q-5-12 — Project render scripts unsupported in this environment

The environment cannot run subprocesses, so project.pre-render / project.post-render scripts were skipped.

What this means

Your project configures render scripts, and this environment cannot run them. The browser-based hub preview runs Quarto compiled to WebAssembly, inside a sandbox with no process model — there is no way to launch Python, R, or a shell from it.

Quarto skips the scripts and renders anyway, so you still get a preview. What that preview lacks is whatever the scripts would have produced: fetched data, generated pages, a rebuilt index.

This is a statement about where the render is happening, not a problem with your configuration. The same project renders with its scripts on a normal machine.

Why this happens

  • Previewing a project in Quarto Hub whose _quarto.yml declares render scripts.
  • A project shared from a machine where the scripts run, opened in the browser preview by a collaborator.

How to fix

Nothing needs fixing for the preview to work. To get the effects of the scripts, render on a machine that can run them:

quarto render

Two ways to keep the browser preview useful in the meantime:

Commit the generated artifacts. If a pre-render script generates files that change rarely, checking them in means the preview sees the same inputs a full render would.

Make the scripts optional. If the generated content is supplementary, the preview showing the document without it is a reasonable degradation — which is what already happens here.