cran/debian repository overview

⁠rcheckserver

• Debian:
• Ubuntu:

The CRAN team maintains a debian meta package⁠ which depends on all packages that are installed on the CRAN Debian check server. This provides a reproducible 'R CMD check' environment for CRAN packages.

⁠How to use

The CRAN team always uses the Debian testing⁠ distribution, which is also what our Debian image⁠ uses. This is a rolling branch, which means system libraries get continously updated, and may get breaking changes.

# Get the latest image
docker pull cran/debian

# Start interactive bash shell
docker run --rm -it cran/debian bash

To quickly test if a package can be built:

docker run --rm -it cran/debian R -e 'install.packages("pdftools")'

Alternatively, our ubuntu based image⁠ provides a similar environment based on the latest Ubuntu (LTS) server, but with the latest R installed from CRAN⁠. This image is smaller and more stable, with slightly older system libraries than Debian, and only non-breaking updates.

docker run --rm -it cran/ubuntu R -e 'install.packages("magick")'

⁠Source code

The files in the source⁠ directory keep track of upstream changes in rcheckserver:

• control⁠: the debian control file which formally specifies the dependencies.
• changelog⁠: keeps track of what has changed and when
• copyright⁠: information from the authors of rcheckserver

We try to automatically update these source files using the source.yml⁠ action.