Install all library dependencies for a particular renv lockfile

If you have a big renv lockfile and you need to install all dependencies on a new machine, the naive strategy of just doing renv::restore() leads to a loop of:

• renv::restore(),
• wait for the next thing that fails to build because of missing system dependency,
• install that one system dependency

That’s annoying.

Here’s a much better hack that Tom Mock taught me about. (Unfortunately, you’ll still hit the above problem if you need dependencies for httr, in particular, libcurl and libssl dev dependencies)

library(httr)
library(jsonlite)
library(tidyr)

lock_json <- jsonlite::fromJSON("renv.lock", simplifyVector = FALSE)

pkg_names <- names(lock_json$Packages)

get_install_scripts <- function(pkg_names){

    # Get package info from Posit package manager
    get_pkg_info <- function(pkg_name){

        # or whatever your distribution is
        url <- paste0("https://packagemanager.posit.co/__api__/repos/1/sysreqs?all=false&pkgname=", pkg_name, "&distribution=debian")
        response <- httr::GET(url, httr::accept_json())
        raw_json <- jsonlite::fromJSON(content(response, "text"), simplifyVector = FALSE)

    }

    # Get install scripts
    all_json <- lapply(pkg_names, get_pkg_info)

    # Flatten to a df with install_scripts as a column
    tibble(pkg = pkg_names, x = all_json) |> 
        unnest_wider(x) |> 
        unnest_longer(requirements) |> 
        unnest_wider(requirements) |> 
        unnest_wider(requirements) |> 
        unnest_longer(install_scripts)
}

get_install_scripts("sf")

# get them all
all_pkgs <- get_install_scripts(pkg_names)

#> # A tibble: 44 × 4
#>    pkg        name  packages   install_scripts                        
#>    <chr>      <chr> <list>     <chr>                                  
#>  1 DBI        <NA>  <NULL>     <NA>                                   
#>  2 KernSmooth <NA>  <NULL>     <NA>                                   
#>  3 MASS       <NA>  <NULL>     <NA>                                   
#>  4 R6         <NA>  <NULL>     <NA>                                   
#>  5 Rcpp       <NA>  <NULL>     <NA>                                   
#>  6 arrow      arrow <list [2]> apt-get install -y libcurl4-openssl-dev
#>  7 arrow      arrow <list [2]> apt-get install -y libssl-dev          
#>  8 assertthat <NA>  <NULL>     <NA>                                   
#>  9 bit        <NA>  <NULL>     <NA>                                   
#> 10 bit64      <NA>  <NULL>     <NA>                                   
#> # ℹ 34 more rows
#> # ℹ Use `print(n = ...)` to see more rows

## ------- just install steps

# pull out the install steps
all_installs <- all_pkgs$install_scripts

as.character(na.omit(all_installs))

#>  [1] "apt-get install -y libcurl4-openssl-dev"
#>  [2] "apt-get install -y libssl-dev"          
#>  [3] "apt-get install -y libssl-dev"          
#>  [4] "apt-get install -y libssl-dev"          
#>  [5] "apt-get install -y libgdal-dev"         
#>  [6] "apt-get install -y gdal-bin"            
#>  [7] "apt-get install -y libgeos-dev"         
#>  [8] "apt-get install -y libproj-dev"         
#>  [9] "apt-get install -y libsqlite3-dev"      
#> [10] "apt-get install -y libudunits2-dev"     
#> [11] "apt-get install -y libudunits2-dev"  

For the lockfile in quarto’s test suite and a bare-bones Debian install, this gives 237 dependencies. That’s a lot of saved time!