quarto render fails on 'database locked'

[rwaaijman]

Description

when rendering a html book project in the newest version of quarto (1.9.37) I get the error:

==> quarto preview index.qmd --to html --no-watch-inputs --no-browse

ERROR: database is locked

Stack trace:
    at async Object.openKv (ext:deno_kv/01_db.ts:10:15)
    at async ProjectCacheImpl.init (file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:87192:22)
    at async createProjectCache (file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:87326:7)
    at async projectContext (file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:92040:22)
    at async _Command.actionHandler (file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:162918:21)
    at async _Command.execute (file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:102102:7)
    at async _Command.parseCommand (file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:101979:14)
    at async quarto4 (file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:187653:5)
    at async file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:187681:5
    at async file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:187536:14
    at async mainRunner (file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:187538:5)
    at async file:///usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto.js:187674:3

in previous versions it all worked well. Is this due to an error?
I work in an environment without internet connection on a linux machine.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

[cscheid]

Do you have multiple quarto preview processes running at the same time, by chance?

[rwaaijman]

Do you have enough information below?

RStudio 2026.05.0+218 "Golden Wattle" Release (89f6cef5d8593410108e06a82f290fd952d506c1, 2026-05-18) for Ubuntu Jammy
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/148.0.0.0 Safari/537.36, Quarto 1.9.37 (/usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto)

and

> Sys.info()
                                      sysname                                       release 
                                      "Linux"                          "5.15.0-179-generic" 
                                      version                                      nodename 
"#189-Ubuntu SMP Tue May 5 18:20:56 UTC 2026"                         "server.cbsp.nl" 
                                      machine                                         login 
                                     "x86_64"                                     "unknown" 
                                         user                                effective_user 
                                      "..@.."                                "..@.." 

version
               _                           
platform       x86_64-pc-linux-gnu         
arch           x86_64                      
os             linux-gnu                   
system         x86_64, linux-gnu           
status                                     
major          4                           
minor          6.0                         
year           2026                        
month          04                          
day            24                          
svn rev        89956                       
language       R                           
version.string R version 4.6.0 (2026-04-24)
nickname       Because it was There   

Else I have to ask the system administrator

[mcanouil]

Thanks, I believe the issue is about the cache database from Quarto CLI that it creates for project under <project>/.quarto, it relies on POSIX file locking which is known to have issues with NFS/SAMBA mounted drives (i.e., network filesystems).

To verify my hypothesis, would you mind sharing the output of the following commands within your project directory:

df -T .
stat -f -c %T .

I expect these commands to show nfs, cifs, smb, fuse.* or similar type.

As an additional confirmation, could you create a dummy project as done before but this time in your home or tmp/ directory instead of the network drive? I expect you won't have errors.

If the above is confirmed, then you are facing the issue reported in:

• quarto render on shared file storage fails with locked database #13006

[rwaaijman]

yes, it is indeed smb2

Filesystem                                      Type    1K-blocks         Used    Available Use% Mounted on
//[server]/[folder] cifs 387889233948 271553012648 116336221300  71% [folder]
smb2

[mcanouil]

Unfortunately, for now, the only workaround is to avoid working on network drives.

[rwaaijman]

yes, you are right, it is working from /tmp

if I'm correct this issue is on the list to be 'fixed' in V1.10?

[rwaaijman]

Thanks for pointing out were to find the issue/solution!
Lets see if we can fix this

[mcanouil]

Milestones should be taken more as "we wish to fix this in XXX" rather than "we promise to fix it in XXX".

[rwaaijman]

@cscheid, I was just wondering if this issue will be fixed with quarto 2, since it is completely rewritten?
So will quarto also render from network drives with quarto 2?

[rwaaijman]

by the way, what I saw at the posit conference with quarto 2 was amazing, also with the version control :)