features.md

title
Rocker Dev Container Features

Overview

The Rocker Project provides some Dev Container Features for installing R or installing software often used with R.

• Source repository: rocker-org/devcontainer-features

You can find them on the Dev Containers site, the GitHub Codespaces Dev Container Editor, or, VSCode Dev Containers.

These can be used to easily configure R on containers without R installed, or to make containers for R even more useful. And of course, we can use them independently of R! (except for the Features to install R)

For example, install R on the default image of Codespaces by editing the devcontainer.json file as follows:

{
    "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/universal:2",
    "features": {
        "ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer-features/r-apt:latest": {}
    }
}

There is also a repository that can be used to try Dev Containers on GitHub Codespaces immediately.

• rocker-org/devcontainer-try-r

Check the source repository for details on each Feature.

Install R on Dev Containers

There are some Dev Container Features that can be used to install R.

1. r-apt
2. r-rig
3. miniforge¹ (See also micromamba provided by mamba-org)

Each of these installations of R will be configured to allow installation of R binary packages in the following ways.

1. System package management system (apt)
2. Posit Public Package Manager (R functions e.g. install.packages)²
3. conda-forge (mamba or conda)

Therefore, which of these you use to install R may depend on which method you wish to use to install the R binary packages.

Some tips for choosing:

• When installing R packages via apt or mamba (conda), dependencies outside of R are installed automatically. But, installing R packages via R function (install.packages) may require separate apt installations of system libraries that are dependencies.
• Generally r-apt installs R packages faster than r-rig. Therefore, if you want to add R to a container, we recommend trying r-apt first. However, r-apt does not support ubuntu on arm64 platform, so if you want to use ubuntu on arm64 platform, use r-rig instead.
• If you want to install any version of R or use R already installed in the container, you can use r-rig to install any version of R or only the R package without installing R.
• If you want to install packages that exist in the conda-forge, you can use miniforge for fast installation with mamba.

Install R packages on Dev Containers

Several Dev Container Features allow R package installation to be defined on devcontainer.json.

1. apt-packages
2. r-packages

These support package installation via apt or R function (pak::pak()).

There are also r-dependent-packages and renv-cache.

• r-dependent-packages supports package installation from a DESCRIPTION file via (pak::local_install_deps()) after container startup.
• renv-cache supports package installation via the renv R package after container startup.

See also

• Rocker Dev Container Images
• Rocker Dev Container Templates

Footnotes

1. This Feature does not directly install R, but it configures mamba so we can use mamba to install R. ↩

2. Of the amd64 and arm64 Debian and Ubuntu platforms that can use r-rig, only amd64 Ubuntu can use Posit Public Package Manager, and Posit Public Package Manager will be not configured on the other platforms. ↩