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. 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 (file.expand("~/R/vscode-R")) and install required packages:

Rscript -e "renv::install(c('languageserver'))"

Get the library path:

Rscript -e '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"
]