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use_lockfile

By default, rv uses a lockfile to ensure packages are sourced from the same location with the same version on each installation and across systems. While rv is designed at its core to be a project package manager, it can also be used as a package installer. In this case, use_lockfile can be set to false and no lockfile will be used during dependency resolution.

rv was designed with reproducibility as a priority, so by default (use_lockfile = true), a missing lockfile is treated as a sign that something is wrong: rv can no longer track each package’s source with full confidence, so it invalidates the entire project library and re-syncs from scratch.

Setting use_lockfile = false opts out of this reproducibility guarantee on purpose, so a missing lockfile is no longer treated as an error condition. Packages are resolved and installed the same way, but without a lockfile to compare against, so an absent lockfile no longer triggers invalidating and re-syncing the library.

Example

Section titled “Example”
rproject.toml
use_lockfile = false
[project]
name = "no lockfile"
r_version = "4.5"
repositories = [
    { alias = "PPM", url = "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/latest" },
]
dependencies = [
    "dplyr",
]