[This article was first published on Getting Genetics Done, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.Reposted from the original at https://blog.stephenturner.us/p/turn-new-data-into-quarto-reports-automaticallyThe {watcher} R package monitors your filesystem and run arbitrary code when files change. You can use this to automate things like creating parameterized Quarto reports. —The watcher R package (watcher.r-lib.org) monitors your filesystem for changes, and can run code automatically when data is created or updated.A helpful use case for this is to monitor a folder for changes, then render a Quarto report for whatever new data arrived.Simple example here starting with an empty data directory and a Quarto template.$ tree.├── data└── report.qmdThis is a parameterized Quarto template that uses Typst to compile a simple PDF report showing a summary() of a CSV you read in.---title: "Automatically compiled report"author: "Stephen Turner"subtitle: "File: `r basename(params$csv_path)`"date: todayformat: typstparams: csv_path: NA---Compiled `r format(Sys.time(), "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z")` from `r params$csv_path`.```{r}``````{r}df penguins |> write.csv("data/penguins.csv")2026-07-15 05:45:33: 1 file(s) changed/Users/sdt5z/Downloads/watcher-test/data/penguins.csvWith this you could start the watcher in a background R process (e.g., running under tmux or something), monitoring a shared drive or some cloud location. Whenever new data arrives, a report gets compiled without you having to do anything.More on the watcher package:Posit blog: https://opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-06-29_watcher-0-2-0/watcher docs: https://watcher.r-lib.org/ Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Getting Genetics Done.R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.Continue reading: Repost: Automatically compile Quarto reports when new data lands