Ease renv::restore() by updating your repository to Posit Public Package Manager

P3M hosts CRAN binaries of R packages’ previous releases

TL; DR

Updating a renv project’s package repository from CRAN to Posit Public Package Manager allows a user to more quickly install previous versions of R packages. It is also easy and free!

Background

The {renv} package is wonderful for documenting and controlling package versions within an R project. See You should use renv by E. David Aja at rstudio::conf(2022) for motivation and Introduction to renv for how to get started.

Package restoration

{renv} facilitates restoration of specific versions of packages documented in the renv.lock via renv::restore(), which installs packages from a specified repository. In the renv.lock, for many users the repository specification might look something like this by default:

   "Repositories": [
      {
        "Name": "CRAN",
        "URL": "https://cloud.r-project.org"
      }
    ]

This will vary user to user based on their specific settings and configurations. What this means is that {renv} is going to that specific url to find and install packages that are available there. In this case, we are installing from the cloud instance of a CRAN mirror.

However, if the packages documented in the renv.lock are of an older version, then the binaries for this package are likely no longer available on CRAN. This means that when {renv} attempts to install that older package from CRAN, the packages will likely have to compile from source which takes longer and may fail for various reasons. This can be a frustrating process to work through.

Solution

Luckily, the Posit Public Package Manager (P3M) exists! This free service hosts binaries of both latest and older packages, solving the time-consuming problem of installing from source. Learn more in Announcing Public Package Manager and v1.1.6 (2020).

To take advantage, you need to update the repositories specified in the renv.lock - replace the CRAN repository with P3M. You can manually edit the renv.lock, or achieve this via

renv::lockfile_modify(repos = c(
  P3M = "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/latest"
  )) |> 
  renv::lockfile_write()

which would result in a modified renv.lock that looks like this:

   "Repositories": [
      {
        "Name": "P3M",
        "URL": "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/latest"
      }
    ]

Note 1: The P3M url specified here works for both macOS and Windows (not Linux). Use the SETUP page to determine what url to use for your needs.

Note 2: You can specify more than one repository for package installation. For example, you can also specify R-universe from ROpenSci or your organization’s Posit Package Manager if you subscribe to that service. That would look something like:

renv::lockfile_modify(repos = c(
  P3M = "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/latest",
  ropensci = "https://ropensci.r-universe.dev",
  org_rspm = "http://rspm.xxxx.org/xxxREPO/latest"
  )) |> 
  renv::lockfile_write()

   "Repositories": [
      {
        "Name": "P3M",
        "URL": "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/latest"
      },
      {
        "Name": "ropensci",
        "URL": "https://ropensci.r-universe.dev"
      },
      {
        "Name": "org_rspm",
        "URL": "http://rspm.xxxx.org/xxxREPO/latest"
      }
    ]

More generally

Outside the scope of {renv} projects, you can set the default repository for package installation via the Global Options menu in RStudio - see the P3M SETUP page for details. Alternatively, you can specify this via options in your R profile:

options("repos" = c(
  "P3M" = "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/latest",
  "ropensci" = "https://ropensci.r-universe.dev",
  "org_rspm" = "http://rspm.xxxx.org/xxxREPO/latest"
  )

If these are your default options, then they will be adopted when you initiate a new renv project.

Conclusion

If you have not yet taken advantage of the Posit Public Package Manager, I highly recommend you do so! It can save a lot of time and frustration when working on renv projects that utilize older versions of packages, and more generally is a great default package installation resource.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to E. David Aja for providing suggestions and feedback on this post. ❤️