Working with renv enabled projects

renv is a package that helps manage library paths to help isolate your project’s R dependencies for better reproducibility of the project.

Since renv uses a private library per project, vscode-R will not work if required packages (e.g. languageserver and jsonlite) are not installed into the project library. There are two general workarounds to this problem.

Option 1: Declare explicit vscode-R dependencies

Within each of your renv enabled projects, consider adding a simple scaffolding.R (or whatever you want to call it) file that explicitly declares your vscode-R dependencies. In most cases, all you would need is:

library(languageserver)
library(httpgd)         # optional
library(vscDebugger)    # optional

Note that you don't actually have to ever call this scaffolding.R file as part of your workflow. But by naming these packages explicitly in a project script, you ensure that renv will configure your project dependencies correctly. Moreover, this ensures that they will be added to renv's global cache, which reduces re-installation overhead across your other VS Code + renv projects.

Option 2: Link a standalone library

Note: Some users have reported that this approach no longer works. See discussion in this thread.

Some users might find it useful to maintain a standalone, minimal user library to provide these packages.

Suppose we want to maintain such a library at ~/R/vscode-R using renv.

renv::init(project = "~/R/vscode-R")

Start R from the folder (path.expand("~/R/vscode-R")) and install required packages:

renv::install(c("languageserver"))

Print the library path:

renv::paths$library()

[1] "/Users/user/R/vscode-R/renv/library/R-4.2/x86_64-apple-darwin17.0"

Write the library path in VS Code settings:

"r.libPaths": [
  "/Users/user/R/vscode-R/renv/library/R-4.2/x86_64-apple-darwin17.0"
]

Then the following R processes running in the background will be launched with the configured library paths appended to .libPaths() on startup:

• R language server
• R help server
• R aliases

And the code editing features and help viewer could continue to work without necessary packages being installed into the project library.

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When working with Rcpp, a good demo is provided at vscode-rcpp-demo. If you're working with renv, the includePath property in .vscode/c_cpp_properties.json needs to manually be pointed at your project's R_LIBS_USER directory. Exempli gratia:

/Users/user/Library/Caches/org.R-project.R/R/renv/library/vscode-rcpp-demo-e5908179/macos/R-4.4/aarch64-apple-darwin20
# becomes
/Users/user/Library/Caches/org.R-project.R/R/renv/library/vscode-rcpp-demo-e5908179/macos/R-4.4/aarch64-apple-darwin20/*/include/