renv::restore() using pak as backend?

[rpodcast]

I'm so excited to see the initial support for pak to install packages with renv! I have everything working for installing packages, but I am testing out the experience of cloning a project and restoring the packages, and running restore() still installs the packages one-by-one even with RENV_CONFIG_PAK_ENABLED = TRUE declared in the project's .Renviron file. Is there another way to trick restore() to leverage pak?

[kevinushey]

Not yet -- that work is being tracked on the pak side here. r-lib/pak#343

[yonicd]

I saw that renv::install() can be ported to pak (NEWS 0.15.0) via an ENV var. is there any way to run the renv::restore() via pak?

renv gains experimental support for the pak package. Set RENV_CONFIG_PAK_ENABLED = TRUE in an appropriate .Renviron file to enable pak integration. When enabled, calls to renv::install() will use pak to download and install packages.

[kevinushey]

I don't think the required infrastructure is available yet on the pak side.

[yonicd]

Sorry I didn’t explain correctly my question. If i set the env var to true and run renv::restore, should renv use pak to install the deps? Or is it not running renv::install (in a vectorized map) under the hood when it restores?

[yonicd]

Found it

restore runs directly *_impl which is too downstream in the direct install() sequence and the pak check clause is done higher up. It should be possible to let pak drive restore too

[kevinushey]

It should be possible to let pak drive restore too

But AFAIK pak doesn't support installation of packages from older versions, e.g.

> pak::pkg_install("renv@0.15.3")
Error: Cannot install packages:
* renv@0.15.3: Versioned CRAN packages are not implemented yet
Type .Last.error.trace to see where the error occurred

So until that's been implemented (or some other similar supporting infrastructure) we can't use pak for restore.

[yonicd]

ah. ok. thanks for the clarification

[yonicd]

I think this would work, since it uses cran github repo meta information, which is one way to do it.

> pak::pkg_install('cran/DiagrammeR@1.0.6.1')
v Updated metadata database: 4.26 MB in 4 files.                           
v Updating metadata database                                               
                                                                            
> Will install 3 packages.
> Will download 2 CRAN packages (88.30 kB).
> Will download 1 package with unknown size.
+ DiagrammeR   1.0.6.1 [bld][cmp][dl] (GitHub: e924ddd)
+ downloader   0.4     [dl] (24.96 kB)
+ influenceR   0.1.0.1 [dl] (63.33 kB)
i Getting 2 pkgs (88.30 kB) and 1 pkg with unknown size
v Got downloader 0.4 (windows) (24.96 kB)                                       
v Got influenceR 0.1.0.1 (windows) (63.33 kB)                                   
v Got DiagrammeR 1.0.6.1 (source) (4.88 MB)                  
v Downloaded 3 packages (4.97 MB)in 8s                       
v Installed downloader 0.4  (203ms)                                          
v Installed influenceR 0.1.0.1  (159ms)                                      
i Packaging DiagrammeR 1.0.6.1                                               
v Packaged DiagrammeR 1.0.6.1 (16.7s)                                        
i Building DiagrammeR 1.0.6.1                                              
v Built DiagrammeR 1.0.6.1 (28.6s)                                         
v Installed DiagrammeR 1.0.6.1 (github::cran/DiagrammeR@e924ddd) (1.5s)      
v 1 + 53 pkgs | kept 12, updated 0, new 3 | downloaded 3 (NA B) 1m 16s

[hadley]

Closing in favour of #1210