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rv docs

Difference with renv

renv is the most popular R package manager in the R ecosystem. It helps you “create reproducible environments for your R projects”.

But renv is not without its issues, many of which lead to the decision to create rv. To fully grasp these issues, we need a bit of renv background.

renv

Section titled “renv”

In renv, users iteratively install packages, then retroactively “snapshot” the current project status to generate a lockfile by calling renv::snapshot.

The lockfile contains 3 main components:

  • Version - The R version used in the project
  • Repositories - A list of repositories where packages were installed from. This is generated by whatever repositories are set in options("repos")
  • Packages - Contains information about each package used in the project, derived from the installed package’s DESCRIPTION file, including its name, version, and data useful to recreate the installation.

A renv snapshot is exactly what it sounds like, it “snapshots” the project status by inspecting the R version, set repositories, and installed packages. This sounds okay in theory, but in practice, these iterative, retroactive snapshots miss crucial information about how, when, and from where a package is installed.

rv

Section titled “rv”

rv takes a completely different approach than renv. Instead of iteratively installing packages and retroactively capturing the state, rv holistically installs the packages you require in your library, ensuring the full dependency tree is resolvable before any package is installed. Even as you add new packages to your project, rv is ensuring each package is compatible with the library at each installation.

Additionally, because rv is handling installation and locking in one step, tracking of how, when, and from where packages are installed can be done more precisely, completely removing the risk of missing information.

Conclusion

Section titled “Conclusion”

Ultimately, renv and rv get you to similar spots in different ways. renv philosophically tries to capture the status of the used packages within your project and leaves it up to the user to determine how to get there and when to snapshot. rv allows the user to declare the desired state of the project, then the tool takes the rest to ensure the project is in a resolvable, reproducible, and consistent state.