Dependency management in R

Question

Does R have a dependency management tool to facilitate project-specific dependencies? I\'m looking for something akin to Java\'s maven, Ruby\'s bundler, Python\'s virtualenv, No

Answer 1

As a stop-gap, I've written a new rbundler package. It installs project dependencies into a project-specific subdirectory (e.g. /.Rbundle), allowing the user to avoid using global libraries.

• rbundler on Github
• rbundler on CRAN

We've been using rbundler at Opower for a few months now and have seen a huge improvement in developer workflow, testability, and maintainability of internal packages. Combined with our internal package repository, we have been able to stabilize development of a dozen or so packages for use in production applications.

A common workflow:

• Check out a project from github
• cd into the project directory
• Fire up R

• From the R console:

  library(rbundler)

  bundle('.')

All dependencies will be installed into ./.Rbundle, and an .Renviron file will be created with the following contents:

R_LIBS_USER='.Rbundle'

Any R operations run from within this project directory will adhere to the project-speciic library and package dependencies. Note that, while this method uses the package DESCRIPTION to define dependencies, it needn't have an actual package structure. Thus, rbundler becomes a general tool for managing an R project, whether it be a simple script or a full-blown package.