rhub/r-minimal repository overview

⁠Minimal Docker images for R

⁠What is R?

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS. See more at https://www.r-project.org/⁠

⁠Goals and features

The main goal of these images is to keep them minimal, so they can be used as part of a bigger (web) application, or as a base image. Currently the r-minimal image is less than 20MB compressed, and 32MB uncompressed.

All images use Alpine Linux.

The images include the installr tools that can install R packages from CRAN or GitHub.

⁠Limitations

To keep the images minimal, they do not include a number of parts and features that most users would prefer to have for interactive R development:

• Recommended R packages are not installed.
• Documentation is not included.
• No readline library support.
• No X11 support.
• No Java support.
• No OpenMP support.
• No JPEG, PNG or TIFF support.
• No Cairo support.
• No Tcl/Tk support.
• No translations, only English.
• The image does not have C, C++ or Fortran compilers.

⁠Dockerfile examples

One of our main goals is to be able to use rhub/r-minimal as a base image, and easily add R packages from CRAN or GitHub to it, to create a new image. Run installr from a Dockerfile to add R packages to the r-minimal image:

FROM rhub/r-minimal
RUN installr praise
CMD [ "R", "--slave", "-e", "cat(praise::praise())" ]

Package with compiled code:

FROM rhub/r-minimal
RUN installr -d glue

After the package(s) have been installed, installr removed the compilers, as these are typically not needed on the final image. If you want to keep them use installr -c instead of installr -d.

Package with system requirements:

FROM rhub/r-minimal
RUN installr -d -t linux-headers pingr
CMD [ "R", "-q", "-e", "pingr::is_online() || stop('offline')" ]

Similarly to compilers, system packages are removed after the R packages have been installed. If you want to keep (some of) them, use installr -a instead of installr -t. (You can also mix the two.)

⁠Popular packages:

Hints on installing some popular R packages:

⁠Known failures

• The CRAN version (version 1.3.1) of the fs package does not build on Alpine Linux: https://github.com/r-lib/fs/issues/210⁠ This is fixed in the development version on GitHub, so install from there:

  installr -d r-lib/fs
  

  Copy

  If you need to install a package that depends on fs, then install fs first.

• The xgboost package does not compile on Alpine Linux: https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost/issues/5131⁠

⁠License

See https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/⁠ for the R licenses

These Dockerfiles are licensed under the MIT License.

(c) R Consortium⁠