Error in loadNamespace(x) : there is no package called ‘JuliaCall’

I just started to learn Julia in Quarto but when I run the following code in a Julia chunk in Quarto:

---
title: "Julia in Quarto"
editor: visual
format: html
---

```{julia}
# generating vectors
# x-axis
x = 1:10
 
# y-axis
y = rand(10)
 
# simple plotting
plot(x, y)
```

It returns:

Error in loadNamespace(x) : there is no package called ‘JuliaCall’

The error still appears even when adding:

using Pkg
Pkg.add("JuliaCall")

To the code chunk. Does anyone knows how to run the following Julia code in Quarto?

Please note: I use Rstudio

Solution

JuliaCall is an R package. Quarto executes Julia code using the IJulia Jupyter kernel. To use it, specify jupyter: julia_version in the YAML header. A Quarto installation guide is available.

To render Quarto documents that contain Julia chunks

Start Julia
Enter package mode by pressing ].
Run Add IJulia
Go back to the REPL (backspace), the default prompt after you start Julia
Run using IJulia
Run notebook(). Use Ctrl+c or quitting julia to stop the Jupyter kernel.

If you don't have Jupyter installed at this point, this will be installed, refer to the above guide for details. This may take a while and prompt some input.

Now you should be able to render a document via the Quarto Cli from a shell and¹ RStudio. For example, the following example.qmd should render and print a matrix.

---
title: "Bla"
jupyter: julia-1.8
---
```{julia}
[1 2 3]
```

This may a slow. Refer to the above guide on installing Revise.jl and using Jupyter Cache to speed things up. I personally experience speedup in using VSCode + Quarto extension over RStudio.

If not, the following allows R users to run Julia code from within R and RStudio,

In R, use install.packages("JuliaCall")
In R, run JuliaCall::julia_setup()

This takes care of some PATH variable and comes with the installJulia optional argument.