Detect application dependencies

appDependencies() recursively detects all R package dependencies for an application by parsing all .R and .Rmd files and looking for calls to library(), require(), requireNamespace(), ::, and so on. It then adds implicit dependencies (i.e. an .Rmd requires Rmarkdown) and adds all recursive dependencies to create a complete manifest of package packages need to be installed to run the app.

Usage

appDependencies(
  appDir = getwd(),
  appFiles = NULL,
  appFileManifest = NULL,
  appMode = NULL
)

Arguments

appDir: A directory containing an application (e.g. a Shiny app or plumber API). Defaults to the current directory.
appFiles, appFileManifest: Use appFiles to specify a character vector of files to bundle in the app or appManifestFiles to provide a path to a file containing a list of such files. If neither are supplied, will bundle all files in appDir, apart from standard exclusions and files listed in a .rscignore file. See listDeploymentFiles() for more details.
appMode: Optional; the type of content being deployed. Provide this option when the inferred type of content is incorrect. This can happen, for example, when static HTML content includes a downloadable Shiny application app.R. Accepted values include "shiny", "api", "rmd-static", "rmd-shiny", "quarto-static", "quarto-shiny", and "static". The Posit Connect API Reference contains a full set of available values. Not all servers support all types of content.

Value

A data frame with one row for each dependency (direct, indirect, and inferred), and 4 columns:

Package: package name.
Version: local version.
Source: a short string describing the source of the package install, as described above.
Repository: for CRAN and CRAN-like repositories, the URL to the repository. This will be ignored by the server if it has been configured with its own repository name -> repository URL mapping.

Dependency discovery

rsconnect use one of three mechanisms to find which packages your application uses:

If renv.lock is present, it will use the versions and sources defined in that file. If you're using the lockfile for some other purpose and don't want it to affect deployment, add renv.lock to .rscignore.
Otherwise, rsconnect will call renv::snapshot() to find all packages used by your code. If you'd instead prefer to only use the packages declared in a DESCRIPTION file, run renv::settings$snapshot.type("explicit") to activate renv's "explicit" mode.
Dependency resolution using renv is a new feature in rsconnect 1.0.0, and while we have done our best to test it, it still might fail for your app. If this happens, please file an issue then set options(rsconnect.packrat = TRUE) to revert to the old dependency discovery mechanism.

Remote installation

When deployed, the app must first install all of these packages, and rsconnect ensures the versions used on the server will match the versions you used locally. It knows how to install packages from the following sources:

CRAN and BioConductor (Source: CRAN or Source: Bioconductor). The remote server will ignore the specific CRAN or Bioconductor mirror that you use locally, always using the CRAN/BioC mirror that has been configured on the server.
Other CRAN like and CRAN-like repositories. These packages will have a Source determined by the value of getOptions("repos"). For example, if you've set the following options:
```
options(
   repos = c(
     CRAN = "https://cran.rstudio.com/",
     CORPORATE = "https://corporate-packages.development.company.com"
   )
)
```
Then packages installed from your corporate package repository will have source CORPORATE. Posit Connect can be configured to override their repository url so that (e.g.) you can use different packages versions on staging and production servers.
Packages installed from GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket, have Source github, gitlab, and bitbucket respectively. When deployed, the bundle contains the additional metadata needed to precisely recreated the installed version.

It's not possible to recreate the packages that you have built and installed from a directory on your local computer. This will have Source: NA and will cause the deployment to error. To resolve this issue, you'll need to install from one of the known sources described above.

Suggested packages

The Suggests field is not included when determining recursive dependencies, so it's possible that not every package required to run your application will be detected.

For example, ggplot2's geom_hex() requires the hexbin package to be installed, but it is only suggested by ggplot2. So if your app uses geom_hex() it will fail, reporting that the hexbin package is not installed.

You can overcome this problem with (e.g.) requireNamespace(hexbin). This will tell rsconnect that your app needs the hexbin package, without otherwise affecting your code.

Examples

if (FALSE) {

# dependencies for the app in the current working dir
appDependencies()

# dependencies for an app in another directory
appDependencies("~/projects/shiny/app1")
}