Feature Request: Consider adding ability to generate a renv lockfile from log

[parmsam-pfizer]

Feature Idea

Consider adding ability to create a renv lockfile from the log file or along with log file creation (at time of aexecture()). This would allow users to more easily recreate the environment that was originally used.

Relevant Input

• Doc on lockfiles
• Creating a lockfile

Relevant Output

No response

Reproducible Example/Pseudo Code

No response

[bms63]

omg this would be amazing!!

[parmsam-pfizer]

I'd love to help out with this feature. Submitting another issue (#162) to parse/filter a log file. This could be associated with that issue.

[parmsam-pfizer]

After more thought and tinkering with renv lockfiles, maybe generating a DESCRIPTION file from log would be a more flexible alternative. {renv} does pull package version from the DESCRIPTION file if its available in an R project: https://rstudio.github.io/renv/reference/install.html?q=description#project-description-files
Any thoughts on this approach instead?

[bms63]

Interesting, so it makes a sort of pseudo-package for you? So if you used 4 packages in the your Script, then A Description Files generated by logrx would be generated with those 4 as Imports. Would suggest have all the packages in the environment but not used?

[parmsam-pfizer]

It could be like a compendium DESCRIPTION file (based on Karthik's talk at RStudio Conf 2019 that I recently saw). We could maybe add the packages in the environment as suggests like you said.

[bms63]

• To investigate to see if feasible.
• renv might not be the solution

[parmsam]

Revisiting this today. As of renv 1.0.0, they added lockfile_* family of functions. Experimented with it and it looks like we can now generate renv lockfiles on the fly without needing to initialize a renv project (via init()). Including example code below. Will still need to confirm it is doing what we might need.

library(renv)

lock_file <- "pkg.lock"

x <- renv::lockfile_create(
  type = "custom",
  packages = c("dplyr", "stringr")
)

renv::lockfile_write(
  lockfile = x,
  file = lock_file,
  type = "custom",
)