🖥️ RENV Template

This template repository provides a way of containerising your R workflows by combining Docker and renv. This requires an opinionated stack of tools, and as such, I have decided to use the following:

• OCI container runtime; the Dockerfile and .devcontainer.json can be used with any OCI compatible runtime (podman) as well as docker
• VSCode: for its ability to have plugins and integration with GitHub and cruciallly, with its ability to use Dev Containers and work within a container
• REditorSupport provides R syntax highlighting, viewing plots and tables, as well as LSP support for R (syntax highlighting, linting, autocompletion).

Workflow

To use this image, follow these steps:

• Click on the green Use this template button and create your repository under your own GitHub. During this creation process, you can mark this as Private and thus only you can see your document
• Pull your GitHub repository locally.
• Create a local (on the host) directory where you will store a cache of your libraries, something like: mkdir -p ~/.renvcache/
• Edit the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file to point the containerised renv cache to the host folder you've just made
• Open VSCode, make sure you have the Dev Containers from Microsoft extensions installed.
• Open the folder where you have cloned the repository. VSCode will prompt you to open this folder with the Dev Containers extension.
• Et Viola! You now have a working locally built, CI/CD integrated

You can now:

• Modify src/... to add your R scripts and perform your analysis.
• Ensure you run renv::snapshot() for renv to find all of the packages you have used

Optionally:

• Rebuild your container to digest the new packages inside the container so that when it restarts all the packages will be present inside the image
• Commit your changes to GitHub once you've done some code. GitHub will then initiate the build of the container image using GitHub Actions
  • Once this completes, you'll have a package release waiting, which you can optionnally make public

Docker Image

The docker image, as seen in .devcontainer/Dockerfile uses rocker/r-ver with the R version set to 4.3.3.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute, please fork/fix/pull requests as you see fit. I've provisionally placed the repository under an MIT license.