The renv package1 helps you create reproducible environments for your R projects. Use renv to make your R projects more isolated, portable and reproducible.
- Isolated: Installing a new or updated package for one project won’t break your other projects, and vice versa. That’s because renv gives each project its own private library.
- Portable: Easily transport your projects from one computer to another, even across different platforms. renv makes it easy to install the packages your project depends on.
- Reproducible: renv records the exact package versions you depend on, and ensures those exact versions are the ones that get installed wherever you go.
Install the latest version of renv from CRAN with:
install.packages("renv")
Use renv::init() to initialize renv in a new or existing project. This
will set up a project library, containing all the packages you’re
currently using. The packages (and all the metadata needed to reinstall
them) are recorded into a lockfile, renv.lock, and a .Rprofile
ensures that the library is used every time you open that project.
As you continue to work on your project, you will install and upgrade
packages, either using install.packages() and update.packages() or
renv::install() and renv::update(). After you’ve confirmed your code
works as expected, use renv::snapshot() to record the packages and
their sources in the lockfile.
Later, if you need to share your code with someone else or run your code
on new machine, your collaborator (or you) can call renv::restore() to
reinstall the specific package versions recorded in the lockfile.
If this is your first time using renv, we strongly recommend starting with the Introduction to renv vignette: this will help you understand the most important verbs and nouns of renv.
If you have a question about renv, please first check the FAQ to see whether your question has already been addressed. If it hasn’t, please feel free to ask on the Posit Forum.
If you believe you’ve found a bug in renv, please file a bug (and, if possible, a reproducible example) at https://github.com/rstudio/renv/issues.
Footnotes
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Pronounced “R” “env” ↩
