This o2r team members Daniel and Edzer had the pleasure to participate in the largest conference of R developers and users, useR!2017 in Brüssels, Belgium.

Daniel Nüst @nordholmen presenting containerit, creates a docker img from an R session to archive reproducibly @o2r_project @cboettig pic.twitter.com/o65O8s8jXY

— Edzer Pebesma (@edzerpebesma) 6. Juli 2017

Daniel presented a new R extension package, containerit, in the Data reproducibility session. It can automatically create a container manifest, i.e. a Dockerfile, from different sources, such as sessions or scripts.

If you want to learn more about containerit, read this blog post and take a look at Daniel’s presentation (also on Zenodo).

Fortunately the presentation was very well-attended and assured our understanding that the importance of reproducibility is wide-spread in the R community. The interest in using containers for this challenge is growing, as shown by the numerous questions Daniel received after the session and the remainder of the conference.

containerit is Open Source Software and we invite you to try it out, inform us about bugs,and even participate in the development. In the near future, we will use the package to automatically create Executable Research Compendia in our reproducibility service, but the package also has an independent roadmap and it hopefully proves useful for many useRs outside of our project.

The talk was recorded, as all other talks at the conference, and this post will be updated when the videos are available.