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renv (version 0.3.0-40)

init: Initialize a Project

Description

Discover packages used within the current project, and then initialize a project-local private R library with those packages. The currently-installed versions of any packages in use (as detected within the default R libraries) are then installed to the project's private library.

Usage

init(project = NULL, settings = NULL, force = FALSE)

Arguments

project

The project directory.

settings

A list of settings to be used with the newly-initialized project.

force

Boolean; force initialization? By default, renv will refuse to initialize the home directory as a project, to defend against accidental misusages of init().

Infrastructure

renv will write or amend the following files in the project:

  • .Rprofile: An auto-loader will be installed, so that new R sessions launched within the project are automatically loaded.

  • renv/activate.R: This script is run by the previously-mentioned .Rprofile to load the project.

  • renv/.gitignore: This is used to instruct Git to ignore the project's private library, as it does not need to be

  • .Rbuildignore: to ensure that the renv directory is ignored during package development; e.g. when attempting to build or install a package using renv.

Details

The primary steps taken when initializing a new project are:

  1. R package dependencies are discovered within the R files used within the project with dependencies();

  2. Discovered packages are copied into the renv global package cache, so these packages can be re-used across future projects as necessary;

  3. Any missing R package dependencies discovered are then installed into the project's private library;

  4. A lockfile capturing the state of the project's library is created with snapshot();

  5. The project is activated with activate().

This mimics the workflow provided by packrat::init(), but with more reasonable default behaviors -- in particular, renv does not attempt to download and store package sources, and renv will re-use packages that have already been installed whenever possible.

If renv sees that the associated project has already been initialized and has a lockfile, then it will attempt to infer the appropriate action to take based on the presence of a private library. If no library is available, renv will restore the private library from the lockfile; if one is available, renv will ask if you want to perform a 'standard' init, restore from the lockfile, or activate the project without taking any further action.