R System Requirements

Compute the system requirements (system libraries; operating system packages) required by a set of R packages.

Usage

sysreqs(
  packages = NULL,
  ...,
  source = NULL,
  recursive = TRUE,
  local = FALSE,
  check = NULL,
  report = TRUE,
  distro = NULL,
  collapse = FALSE,
  project = NULL
)

Arguments

packages

A vector of R package names. When NULL (the default), the packages recorded in the project lockfile are used, together with the project's package dependencies as reported via dependencies().

...

Unused arguments, reserved for future expansion. If any arguments are matched to ..., renv will signal an error.

source

The sources to consult when resolving package records for system requirement lookup. For each package, the sources are tried in order, and the first source able to provide a record for that package is used:

• "lockfile": use the record in the project lockfile,

• "library": use the DESCRIPTION of the installed package,

• "crandb": query https://crandb.r-pkg.org for the package.

The default consults all three, in the order listed above. Note that lockfiles produced by older versions of renv may not include the SystemRequirements field in their records; such records are used only to infer the package version. When the package version is known, an installed copy of the package is only used if its version matches, and crandb is queried for that specific version. Otherwise, crandb is queried for the latest version available from the active package repositories. crandb only has records of CRAN releases; when it has no record of the requested version, the latest CRAN release is used as a last resort.

recursive

Boolean; should the system requirements of the recursive dependencies of packages be included as well? Only the dependencies required to install a package (Depends, Imports, and LinkingTo) are considered. Note that the dependencies of a package are determined from the version of that package being used; see Package versions for more details.

local

Boolean; superseded by source. local = TRUE is equivalent to source = "library"; that is, only locally-installed copies of packages are used when resolving system requirements.

check

Boolean; should renv also check whether the requires system packages appear to be installed on the current system? Ignored when distro is supplied.

report

Boolean; should renv also report the commands which could be used to install all of the requisite package dependencies?

distro

The name of the Linux distribution for which system requirements should be checked – typical values are "ubuntu", "debian", and "redhat". These should match the distribution names used by the R system requirements database. A version suffix can be included; for example, "ubuntu:24.04".

collapse

Boolean; when reporting which packages need to be installed, should the report be collapsed into a single installation command? When FALSE (the default), a separate installation line is printed for each required system package.

project

The project directory. If NULL, then the active project will be used. If no project is currently active, then the current working directory is used instead.

Details

This function relies on the database of package system requirements maintained by Posit at https://github.com/rstudio/r-system-requirements, as well as the "meta-CRAN" service at https://crandb.r-pkg.org. This service primarily exists to map the (free-form) SystemRequirements field used by R packages to the system packages made available by a particular operating system.

As an example, the curl R package depends on the libcurl system library, and declares this with a SystemRequirements field of the form:

• libcurl (>= 7.62): libcurl-devel (rpm) or libcurl4-openssl-dev (deb)

This dependency can be satisfied with the following command line invocations on different systems:

• Debian: sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev

• Redhat: sudo dnf install libcurl-devel

and so sysreqs("curl") would help provide the name of the package whose installation would satisfy the libcurl dependency.

Package versions

System requirements belong to a specific version of a package, not to the package in general. Each version of a package declares its own SystemRequirements, and its own R package dependencies, and both can change from one release to the next. For example, ragg 1.3.0 declares:

• freetype2, libpng, libtiff, libjpeg

whereas ragg 1.5.2 declares:

• freetype2, libpng, libtiff, libjpeg, libwebp, libwebpmux

This means that the system packages reported by sysreqs() are only accurate for the package versions that were used to compute them. The same call can give different results in different projects, or in the same project after its packages have been updated.

For each package, including those found as recursive dependencies, sysreqs() uses the first of the following versions which is available:

1. The version recorded in the project lockfile,

2. The version installed in the active library paths,

3. The latest version available from the active package repositories.

These correspond to the "lockfile", "library", and "crandb" sources; see the source argument for more details. Each package is resolved independently, so the versions used need not come from the same source.

If you are using sysreqs() to prepare a system for restore(), make sure the lockfile is up-to-date, so that sysreqs() reports on the same package versions that restore() will later install.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{

# report the required system packages for this system
sysreqs()

# report the required system packages for a specific OS
sysreqs(distro = "ubuntu:24.04")

# report the system packages required by a package, using
# the latest version available from the package repositories
sysreqs("ragg", source = "crandb", distro = "ubuntu:24.04")

} # }