R env

More on reproducibility…
Author

Caio dos Santos

Published

March 2, 2023

Frontmatter check Render rmarkdown

What happens when we change the Rmd file and commit?

In Blog 5 you had the first exposure to Github Actions. We just checked frontmatter compliance (as we do for this round). You see that we have added a second action - here, we are converting the Rmarkdown document to a markdown file by running render_rmarkdown on Github. This action passes successfully for this document. We want to do something similar for blog #4.

Now start reading …

Read the vignette Introduction to renv for the renv R package by Kevin Ushey.

Then do:

  1. Install the R package renv on your local machine.

  2. In the project for blog 4, initialize the workflow used by the renv package.

  3. Add all dependencies to the environment (implicitly by installing all the depepndencies or explicilty by listing dependencies in a DESCRIPTION file).

  4. Add the renv folder to your blog 4 repository, and push the changes.

  5. Is the github action working? Read any potential error messages in the workflow and try to fix things. Make sure to check stackoverflow for help, don’t forget our Discussion board!

Write a blog post addressing the following questions:

  1. What is the idea of the renv package?

  2. In 50 to 100 words describe your experience working with renv. What went well? What did not go so well?

Submit this blog post to your blog-6 repo.

The idea behind the renv package

The package was designed to allow R users to manage their project dependencies. This allows users to manage their r packages separately for each project, improving reproducibility and reliability of the code. The renv package allows users to lock the versions of their dependencies for each project, decreasing the chances of a script crashing after updating a package. Other languages, such as Python, have similar frameworks of virtual environment.

My experience with renv

Overall, it was quick and easy to set up. The renv.lock file contains all the dependency versions that need to be recorded. When initializing the environment, the renv package checks the dependencies and sets up a folder for the project libraries. I believe this will make code much more reproducible.