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rv docs

Environment Variables

rv respects existing environment variables and introduces a few as well. This page contains information about what each does and how it effects rv:

PKGCACHE_TIMEOUT

Section titled “PKGCACHE_TIMEOUT”

rv keeps a cached version of the repository database, which tracks which package versions are available in the repository. It is in seconds, and defaults to 3600, or 1 hour, and corresponds to the PKGCACHE_TIMEOUT environment variable in pkgcache.

RV_NUM_CPUS

Section titled “RV_NUM_CPUS”

rv parallelizes as much as possible. By default, rv will use all CPUs available to make the installation as fast as possible, but for some users (especially in cloud computing environments) setting a cap on the number of CPUs to use may be useful.

RV_NO_CHECK_OPEN_FILE

Section titled “RV_NO_CHECK_OPEN_FILE”

On certain file systems, particularly NFS, packages which are loaded in R are locked and can not be removed until they are unloaded. rv by default checks if any of the packages in the library are open (or in use) and does not allow a sync if any of those packages need to be removed. To override this behavior, this variable can be set to true or 1 to not check for open files if the file system is known to not have these issues.

RV_SYS_REQ_URL

Section titled “RV_SYS_REQ_URL”

For certain Linux distributions, currently Ubuntu and Debian, rv will check if the system dependencies for packages are found. To determine each package’s system dependencies, rv consults Posit Package Manager’s api by default. This environment variable can be used to tune where rv determines the system dependencies from.

RV_SYS_DEPS_CHECK_IN_PATH

Section titled “RV_SYS_DEPS_CHECK_IN_PATH”

For certain Linux distributions, currently Ubuntu and Debian, rv will check if the system dependencies for packages are found. To check if the system dependencies required for this project are installed, rv consults the dpkg database, a list of known dependencies on the path, and any dependencies set by this environment variable in a comma separated list.

Known Path Dependencies

Section titled “Known Path Dependencies”

rv declares the “known” dependencies on the path as: rustc, cargo, pandoc, texlive, chromium, and google-chrome.

Section titled “RV_LINK_MODE”

rv aggressively cache’s in order to avoid re-compiling and re-downloading pages. Additionally, caching minimizes the disk space used by installed packages. By default, rv will hard-link for Windows and Linux and copy on write for macOS.