Determining system dependencies for R projects
Locking down R package dependencies and versions is a solved problem, thanks to the easy-to-use renv package. System dependencies — those Linux packages that need to be installed to make certain R packages work — are a bit harder to manage. Option 1: Hard-coding The easiest option is to hard-code the system dependencies. I did this recently when I was creating a Dockerfile for a very simple Plumber API: RUN apt-get update -qq && apt-get -y --no-install-recommends install \ make \ libsodium-dev \ libicu-dev \ libcurl4-openssl-dev \ libssl-dev My Dockerfile used only three R packages and so its system dependencies were not complicated.