Building an R Environment

This guide covers configuring R environments in envd. If you’re new to envd please read our Tutorial and build configuration guides first.

Specifying R

First, you can specify to use the R language in the base function.

def build():
    base(os="ubuntu20.04", language="r")

R packages

You can install R packages with install.r_packages function. The following example installs remotes and rlang packages:

def build():
    base(os="ubuntu20.04", language="r")
    install.r_packages([
            "remotes",
            "rlang",
        ])

Configuring CRAN Mirror

By default, the RStudio CRAN mirror "https://cran.rstudio.com" is used when downloading and installing R packages. However, you can specify any other mirrors via config.cran_mirror() like the following:

def build():
    base(os="ubuntu20.04", language="r")
    config.cran_mirror(url="https://cloud.r-project.org/")
    install.r_packages([
            "remotes",
            "rlang",
        ])

Specifying shell program

You can specify shell program used in the environment with shell function. The following example uses zsh:

def build():
    base(os="ubuntu20.04", language="r")
    shell("zsh")

Specifying VSCode extensions

You can specify VSCode extensions with install.vscode_extensions function. The following example installs REditorSupport.r-lsp^[1]:

def build():
    base(os="ubuntu20.04", language="r")
    install.vscode_extensions(["REditorSupport.r-lsp"])

Setting up RStudio server

You can set up RStudio server with config.rstudio_server.

def build():
    ...
    config.rstudio_server()

Endpoint can be got through envd envs list command.

$ envd envs list
NAME    ENDPOINT                        SSH TARGET      IMAGE           GPU     CUDA    CUDNN   STATUS          CONTAINER ID 
r-basic rstudio: http://localhost:34621 r-basic.envd    r-basic:dev     false   <none>  <none>  Up 6 hours      1eb7d40e5a8a

Then you can connect to the RStudio server by using http://localhost:34621 in your browser. Please use envd as the username, and the password can be any string.

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1. open-vsx is used instead of Microsoft VSCode Marketplace due to licensing issues. ↩︎