renv (version 1.0.7)

paths: Path for storing global state

Description

By default, renv stores global state in the following OS-specific folders:

Platform	Location
Linux	~/.cache/R/renv
macOS	~/Library/Caches/org.R-project.R/R/renv
Windows	%LOCALAPPDATA%/R/cache/R/renv

If desired, this path can be customized by setting the RENV_PATHS_ROOT environment variable. This can be useful if you'd like, for example, multiple users to be able to share a single global cache.

Usage

paths

Customising individual paths

The various state sub-directories can also be individually adjusted, if so desired (e.g. you'd prefer to keep the cache of package installations on a separate volume). The various environment variables that can be set are enumerated below:

Environment Variable	Description
RENV_PATHS_ROOT	The root path used for global state storage.
RENV_PATHS_LIBRARY	The path to the project library.
RENV_PATHS_LIBRARY_ROOT	The parent path for project libraries.
RENV_PATHS_LIBRARY_STAGING	The parent path used for staged package installs.
RENV_PATHS_SANDBOX	The path to the sandboxed R system library.
RENV_PATHS_LOCKFILE	The path to the lockfile.
RENV_PATHS_CELLAR	The path to the cellar, containing local package binaries and sources.
RENV_PATHS_SOURCE	The path containing downloaded package sources.
RENV_PATHS_BINARY	The path containing downloaded package binaries.
RENV_PATHS_CACHE	The path containing cached package installations.
RENV_PATHS_PREFIX	An optional prefix to prepend to the constructed library / cache paths.
RENV_PATHS_RENV	The path to the project's renv folder. For advanced users only.
RENV_PATHS_RTOOLS	(Windows only) The path to Rtools.
RENV_PATHS_EXTSOFT	(Windows only) The path containing external software needed for compilation of Windows source packages.

(If you want these settings to persist in your project, it is recommended that you add these to an appropriate R startup file. For example, these could be set in: a project-local .Renviron, the user-level .Renviron, or a site-wide file at file.path(R.home("etc"), "Renviron.site"). See Startup for more details).

Note that renv will append platform-specific and version-specific entries to the set paths as appropriate. For example, if you have set:

Sys.setenv(RENV_PATHS_CACHE = "/mnt/shared/renv/cache")

then the directory used for the cache will still depend on the renv cache version (e.g. v2), the R version (e.g. 3.5) and the platform (e.g. x86_64-pc-linux-gnu). For example:

/mnt/shared/renv/cache/v2/R-3.5/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

This ensures that you can set a single RENV_PATHS_CACHE environment variable globally without worry that it may cause collisions or errors if multiple versions of R needed to interact with the same cache.

If reproducibility of a project is desired on a particular machine, it is highly recommended that the renv cache of installed packages + binary packages is backed up and persisted, so that packages can be easily restored in the future -- installation of packages from source can often be arduous.

Sharing state across operating systems

If you need to share the same cache with multiple different Linux operating systems, you may want to set the RENV_PATHS_PREFIX environment variable to help disambiguate the paths used on Linux. For example, setting RENV_PATHS_PREFIX = "ubuntu-bionic" would instruct renv to construct a cache path like:

/mnt/shared/renv/cache/v2/ubuntu-bionic/R-3.5/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

If this is required, it's strongly recommended that this environment variable is set in your R installation's Renviron.site file, typically located at file.path(R.home("etc"), "Renviron.site"), so that it can be active for any R sessions launched on that machine.

Starting from renv 0.13.0, you can also instruct renv to auto-generate an OS-specific component to include as part of library and cache paths, by setting the environment variable:

RENV_PATHS_PREFIX_AUTO = TRUE

The prefix will be constructed based on fields within the system's /etc/os-release file. Note that this is the default behavior with renv 1.0.6 when using R 4.4.0 or later.

Package cellar

If your project depends on one or R packages that are not available in any remote location, you can still provide a locally-available tarball for renv to use during restore. By default, these packages should be made available in the folder as specified by the RENV_PATHS_CELLAR environment variable. The package sources should be placed in a file at one of these locations:

• ${RENV_PATHS_CELLAR}/<package>_<version>.<ext>

• ${RENV_PATHS_CELLAR}/<package>/<package>_<version>.<ext>

• <project>/renv/cellar/<package>_<version>.<ext>

• <project>/renv/cellar/<package>/<package>_<version>.<ext>

where .<ext> is .tar.gz for source packages, or .tgz for binaries on macOS and .zip for binaries on Windows. During restore(), renv will search the cellar for a compatible package, and prefer installation with that copy of the package if appropriate.

Older versions

Older version of renv used a different default cache location. Those cache locations are:

Platform	Location
Linux	~/.local/share/renv
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/renv
Windows	%LOCALAPPDATA%/renv

If an renv root directory has already been created in one of the old locations, that will still be used. This change was made to comply with the CRAN policy requirements of R packages.

Examples

# get the path to the project library
path <- renv::paths$library()