Bundling packages and webr with a JupyterLite distribution

[psychemedia]

I note from the Shinylive 0.8.0 announcement blog post that ShinyLive now bundles R packages:

Previously Shinylive downloaded R packages at runtime from the webR default repository. However, that repository follows CRAN and upgrades packages to the latest version reasonably often. So, to help provide long-lived reproducibility, the latest version of Shinylive now not only deploys your application source but also downloads and bundles as many R package binaries as possible in the exported app.

I have been working on a standalone/self-contained jupyterlite-webr distribution where I have created package repo directory and a wasm-r directory inside as the top of the JupyterLite distribution directory so that I can pull the webr wasm package and any other packages I need from a local directory. Currently, I compile the packages in a separate upstream repo then manually copy them to my Jupyterlite build repo, but ideally everything would be self-contained in a single repo.

I also have a downstream third repo/step that uses pyinstaller to bundle the jupyterlite distribution with a simple flask webserver into a standalone executable that can be run on the desktop to serve the jupyterlite ditribution locally.

It would be useful if we could simply specify a "self-contained" option that would bundle:

• webr at a specified version
• build and bundle packages at a specified version

for use in the jupyterlite kernel / distribution.