Checkout a repository — checkout • renv

renv::checkout() can be used to retrieve the latest-available packages from a (set of) package repositories.

checkout(
  repos = NULL,
  ...,
  packages = NULL,
  date = NULL,
  clean = FALSE,
  actions = "restore",
  restart = NULL,
  project = NULL
)

Arguments

repos: The R package repositories to use.
...: Unused arguments, reserved for future expansion. If any arguments are matched to ..., renv will signal an error.
packages: The packages to be installed. When NULL (the default), all packages currently used in the project will be installed, as determined by dependencies(). The recursive dependencies of these packages will be included as well.
date: The snapshot date to use. When set, the associated snapshot as available from the Posit's public Package Manager instance will be used. Ignored if repos is non-NULL.
clean: Boolean; remove packages not recorded in the lockfile from the target library? Use clean = TRUE if you'd like the library state to exactly reflect the lockfile contents after restore().
actions: The action(s) to perform with the requested repositories. This can either be "snapshot", in which renv will generate a lockfile based on the latest versions of the packages available from repos, or "restore" if you'd like to install those packages. You can use c("snapshot", "restore") if you'd like to generate a lockfile and install those packages in a single call.
restart: Should the R session be restarted after the new packages have been checked out? When NULL (the default), the session is restarted if the "restore" action was taken.
project: The project directory. If NULL, then the active project will be used. If no project is currently active, then the current working directory is used instead.

Details

renv::checkout() is most useful with services like the Posit's Package Manager, as it can be used to switch between different repository snapshots within an renv project. In this way, you can upgrade (or downgrade) all of the packages used in a particular renv project to the package versions provided by a particular snapshot.

Note that calling renv::checkout() will also install the version of renv available as of the requested snapshot date, which might be older or lack features available in the currently-installed version of renv. In addition, the project's renv/activate.R script will be re-generated after checkout. If this is undesired, you can re-install a newer version of renv after checkout from your regular R package repository.

Caveats

If your library contains packages installed from other remote sources (e.g. GitHub), but a version of a package of the same name is provided by the repositories being checked out, then please be aware that the package will be replaced with the version provided by the requested repositories. This could be a concern if your project uses R packages from GitHub whose name matches that of an existing CRAN package, but is otherwise unrelated to the package on CRAN.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{

# check out packages from PPM using the date '2023-01-02'
renv::checkout(date = "2023-01-02")

# alternatively, supply the full repository path
renv::checkout(repos = c(PPM = "https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/cran/2023-01-02"))

# only check out some subset of packages (and their recursive dependencies)
renv::checkout(packages = "dplyr", date = "2023-01-02")

# generate a lockfile based on a snapshot date
renv::checkout(date = "2023-01-02", actions = "snapshot")

} # }