Working with renv enabled projects - REditorSupport/vscode-R GitHub Wiki

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 (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.