Running R(studio) on a managed work computer

[JustinR]

Hi there,

I'm not sure if this has been discussed on an existing topic somewhere, but if that's the case it would be appreciated if i can be pointed in the right direction.

I have the following challenge. I've been trying to use R-Studio on my work laptop. First of all applications need to be installed by the it-department of the firm. Secondly, only certain connections with 'outside' are allowed (firewall). So I can get the it-department to install r and r-studio. But starting it and getting any kind of update or download of packages is impossible. My firms solution is to email the security officer every time I need to do analyses. This is of course not a very practical solution. Now I know there is a way to download packages separately and install them on the local drive. Would that be my best bet?

Anyhow, is there some kind of guide on how to handle this situation? It would be nice to be able to sit down with somebody from my it-department and work towards a working solution. I am now endlessly lost in explaining what R is and how it kind of works, but because they don't totally understand and know how it's supposed to be used, they find it hard to come up with a good work around.

Hope somebody can help me a long!

[nirgrahamuk]

If you use renv, to manage your per project dependencies, you could benefit from having a renv cache, so that a package you installed for one project can be installed for another , from renv's disk cache rather than going online for it.

You could start by making a 'greedy' project that installs every package you think you might ever need (to fill the cache) ; and you could look at Top downloaded METACRAN to see the most popular packages downloaded by others, its likely if you choose the top 100 they will cover the majority of your needs, though this might change if you are doing niche work, or need bioconductor stuff. but its the first idea that comes to mind.

Introduction to renv