Use renv in a project — init • renv

Call renv::init() to start using renv in the current project. This will:

Set up project infrastructure (as described in scaffold()) including the project library and the .Rprofile that ensures renv will be used in all future sessions,
Discover the packages that are currently being used in your project (via dependencies()), and install them into the project library (as described in hydrate()),
Create a lockfile that records the state of the project library so it can be restored by others (as described in snapshot()),
Restart R (if running inside RStudio).

If you call renv::init() with a project that is already using renv, it will attempt to do the right thing: it will restore the project library if it's missing, or otherwise ask you what to do.

Usage

init(
  project = NULL,
  ...,
  profile = NULL,
  settings = NULL,
  bare = FALSE,
  force = FALSE,
  repos = NULL,
  bioconductor = NULL,
  load = TRUE,
  restart = interactive()
)

Arguments

project: The project directory. When NULL (the default), the current working directory will be used. The R working directory will be changed to match the requested project directory.
...: Unused arguments, reserved for future expansion. If any arguments are matched to ..., renv will signal an error.
profile: The profile to be activated. See vignette("profiles", package = "renv") for more information.
settings: A list of settings to be used with the newly-initialized project.
bare: Boolean; initialize the project with an empty project library, without attempting to discover and install R package dependencies?
force: Boolean; force initialization? By default, renv will refuse to initialize the home directory as a project, to defend against accidental misusages of init().
repos: The R repositories to be used in this project. See Repositories for more details.
bioconductor: The version of Bioconductor to be used with this project. Setting this may be appropriate if renv is unable to determine that your project depends on a package normally available from Bioconductor. Set this to TRUE to use the default version of Bioconductor recommended by the BiocManager package.
load: Boolean; should the project be loaded after it is initialized?
restart: Boolean; attempt to restart the R session after initializing the project? A session restart will be attempted if the "restart" R option is set by the frontend hosting R.

Value

The project directory, invisibly. Note that this function is normally called for its side effects.

Repositories

If the default R repositories have not already been set, renv will use the Posit Public Package Manager CRAN mirror for package installation. The primary benefit to using this mirror is that it can provide pre-built binaries for R packages on a variety of commonly-used Linux distributions. This behavior can be configured or disabled if desired -- see the options in config() for more details.

Examples


if (FALSE) {

# disable automatic snapshots
auto.snapshot <- getOption("renv.config.auto.snapshot")
options(renv.config.auto.snapshot = FALSE)

# initialize a new project (with an empty R library)
renv::init(bare = TRUE)

# install digest 0.6.19
renv::install("digest@0.6.19")

# save library state to lockfile
renv::snapshot()

# remove digest from library
renv::remove("digest")

# check library status
renv::status()

# restore lockfile, thereby reinstalling digest 0.6.19
renv::restore()

# restore automatic snapshots
options(renv.config.auto.snapshot = auto.snapshot)

}