### Discussed in https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/discussions/3784

<div type='discussions-op-text'>

<sup>Originally posted by **edalfon** December 29, 2022</sup>
Hi,

We use [includes](https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/includes.html) to re-use content across documents in a Quarto website project. 

In this project, we set the [option `execute-dir: project`](https://quarto.org/docs/reference/projects/websites.html) to keep the working directory for computations pinned to the root directory of the project. That way, for example, all documents can refer to `./data/fancy_data`, regardless of which subfolder they are placed in. For us this is important because we organize the content of the project in a bunch of subfolders that can go nested to different depth. Without the `execute-dir: project` the project would simply be much harder to mantain and keep track of the paths we should use in each document.

We expected `{{< include >}}` to follow the same project's `execute-dir` option, but it doesn't seem so. Instead, it always resolves to the same folder of the file you are including content in. So if you are in a subfolder and whant to include some content in the root of the project, you cannot do this `{{< include _codebit.qmd>}}`, but you have to do something like this `{{< include ../../../_codebit.qmd>}}`. And the `../../...` part would depend on where the document lives and if you decide to reorganize the structure of the documents, you would need to update that as well. So, it is a bit of a mess.

We couldn't find a way around this or any other option similar to `execute-dir`, but for the whole working directory of the project and not only for computations.

Wouldn't it be better to have the includes directive to follow the `execute-dir` option?, is there currently any way to do it?</div>
cwickham
2022-12-29T13:48:39Z
dragonstyle
documentation triaged-to includes
v1.4
open
Better document where project paths (starting with `/` to get to project root) can be used
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/issues/3788