Introduction +
+ + +WARNING: This package is in very early development. I’ve literally have only worked 4 hours on it. DO NOT USE IT!
+{rix} is an R package that provides helper functions to help you setup development environments that contain all the required packages that you need for your project. This is achieved by using the Nix package manager that you must install separately. The Nix package manager is extremely powerful: with it, it is possible to work on totally reproducible development environments, and even install old releases of R and R packages. With Nix, it is essentially possible to replace renv and Docker combined. Nix is available for Linux, macOS and Windows.
The Nix package manager +
+Nix is a piece of software that can be installed on your computer (regardless of OS) and can be used to install software like with any other package manager. If you’re familiar with the Ubuntu Linux distribution, you likely have used apt-get to install software. On macOS, you may have used homebrew for similar purposes. Nix functions in a similar way, but has many advantages over classic package managers. The main advantage of Nix, at least for our purposes, is that its repository of software is huge. As of writing, it contains more than 80’000 packages, and the entirety of CRAN is available through Nix’s repositories. This means that using Nix, it is possible to install not only R, but also all the packages required for your project. The obvious question is why use Nix instead of simply installing R and R packages as usual. The answer is that Nix makes sure to install every dependency of any package, up to required system libraries. For example, the xlsx package requires the Java programming language to be installed on your computer to successfully install. This can be difficult to achieve, and xlsx bullied many R developers throughout the years (especially those using a Linux distribution, sudo R CMD javareconf still plagues my nightmares). But with Nix, it suffices to declare that we want the xlsx package for our project, and Nix figures out automatically that Java is required and installs and configures it. It all just happens without any required intervention from the user. The second advantage of Nix is that it is possible to pin a certain revision for our project. Pinning a revision ensures that every package that Nix installs will always be at exactly the same versions, regardless of when in the future the packages get installed.
Rix workflow +
+The idea of {rix} is for you to declare the environment you need, and then continue working on that isolated environment. It is possible to have as many environments as projects. Each environment is isolated (or not, it’s up to you).
The main function of {rix} is called rix(). rix() has 4 arguments:
-
+
- the R version you need for your project +
- a list of R packages that your project needs +
- whether you want to use RStudio as an IDE for your project +
- a path to save a file called
default.nix.
+
default.nix +
+The Nix package manager can be used to build reproducible development environments according to the specifications found in a file called default.nix. To make it easier for R programmers to use Nix, {rix} can be used to write this file for you. Once this file has been written, go to where you chose to write it (ideally in a new, empty folder that will be the root folder of your project) and use the Nix package manager to build the environment. Call the following function in a terminal:
nix-buildOnce Nix done building the environment, you can start working on it interactively by using the following command:
+nix-shellYou will drop in a Nix shell. You can now call the IDE of your choice. For RStudio, simply call:
+rstudioThis will start RStudio. RStudio will use the version of R and library of packages from that environment.
+Running programs from an environment +
+You could create a bash script that you put in the path to make this process more streamlined. For example, if your project is called housing, you could create this script and execute it to start your project:
!#/bin/bash
+nix-shell /absolute/path/to/housing/default.nix --run rstudioThis will execute RStudio in the environment for the housing project. If you use targets you could execute the pipeline in the environment by running:
nix-shell /absolute/path/to/housing/default.nix --run Rscript -e 'targets::tar_make()'Installation +
+You can install the development version of rix from GitHub with:
+
+# install.packages("devtools")
+devtools::install_github("b-rodrigues/rix")Example +
+This is a basic example which shows you how to solve a common problem:
+
+library(rix)
+## basic example codeWhat is special about using README.Rmd instead of just README.md? You can include R chunks like so:
+summary(cars)
+#> speed dist
+#> Min. : 4.0 Min. : 2.00
+#> 1st Qu.:12.0 1st Qu.: 26.00
+#> Median :15.0 Median : 36.00
+#> Mean :15.4 Mean : 42.98
+#> 3rd Qu.:19.0 3rd Qu.: 56.00
+#> Max. :25.0 Max. :120.00You’ll still need to render README.Rmd regularly, to keep README.md up-to-date. devtools::build_readme() is handy for this.
You can also embed plots, for example:
+
In that case, don’t forget to commit and push the resulting figure files, so they display on GitHub and CRAN.
+