Frequently Asked Questions

Why isn’t my package being snapshotted into the lockfile?

By default, renv uses the intersection of:

  1. Packages installed into your project library, and

  2. Packages which appear to be used in your project, as discovered by renv::dependencies(),

in determining which packages should enter the lockfile. The intention is that only the packages you truly require for your project should enter the lockfile; development dependencies (e.g. devtools) normally should not.

If you find a package is not entering the lockfile, you can check the output of:

renv::dependencies()

and see whether usages of your package are reported in the output.

Note that renv’s dependency discovery machinery relies on static analysis of your R code, and does not understand all of the different ways in which a package might be used in a project. For example, renv will detect the following usages:

library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)

But it will be unable to detect these kinds of usages:

for (package in c("dplyr", "ggplot2")) {
  library(package, character.only = TRUE)
}

If you use a custom package loader in your project that renv could feasibly support, please feel free to file a feature request.

Capturing All Dependencies

If you’d instead prefer to capture all packages installed into your project library (and eschew dependency discovery altogether), you can do so with:

renv::settings$snapshot.type("all")

Packages can also be explicitly ignored through a project setting, e.g. with:

renv::settings$ignored.packages("<package>")

You might also want to double-check the set of ignored packages (renv::settings$ignored.packages()) and confirm that you aren’t unintentionally ignoring a package you actually require.

See the documentation in ?snapshot for more details.

Capturing Explicit Dependencies

If you’d like to explicitly declare which packages your project depends on, you can do so by telling renv to form “explicit” snapshots:

renv::settings$snapshot.type("explicit")

In this mode, renv will only include packages which are explicitly listed in the project’s DESCRIPTION file as dependencies.

How should I handle development dependencies?

This is related to the above question: by design, renv.lock normally only captures build-time or deploy-time dependencies; it may not capture the packages that you use in iterative workflows (e.g. devtools). However, you may want some way of still ensuring these development dependencies get installed when trying to restore a project library.

For cases like these, we recommend tracking these packages in a project DESCRIPTION file; typically, within the Suggests: field. Then, you can execute:

renv::install()

to request that renv install the packages as described in the DESCRIPTION file. In addition, the Remotes: fields will be parsed and used, to ensure packages are installed from their declared remote source as appropriate.