renv: how should we configure renv when the R common library is not writable by users?

[dsp1]

We would like to use renv for package management in a small team of people working collaboratively on a computing cluster. Since R was installed by the system administrator, the R common library only contains ~20 packages and is not writable by users (i.e. we can't install additional packages here). The knock-on effect seems to be that the renv cache is not very effective at reducing disk-space requirements because it only links to the ~20 packages pre-installed by the admin. Every other package ends up being re-installed in each of the users local renv libraries for every project they work on. Is there a more time and disk-space efficient way to use renv in this situation? Could we make the renv cache work with USER libraries (R_LIBS_USER), which would reduce the duplication across projects? Or, change the location of the R common library to somewhere that is writable by all users?

We might be able to work around these problems using a local installation of R, but I am just interested to know whether renv is designed to be configurable for the situation described above (or if I have misunderstood something about how it is supposed to work).

Thanks!

[kevinushey]

Does your computing cluster have some global storage space available? If so, you should be able to configure renv to place its package cache there, using something like:

RENV_PATHS_CACHE = /path/to/shared/storage/renv/cache

This could be placed in an appropriate startup .Renviron file -- see ?Startup in R for more details. See also Installing packages • renv, which discusses the use of the renv cache in a bit more detail.