Simplifies the creation of reproducible data science environments using the ‘Nix’ package manager, as described in Dolstra (2006) . The included ‘rix()’ function generates a complete description of the environment as a ‘default.nix’ file, which can then be built using ‘Nix’. This results in project specific software environments with pinned versions of R, packages, linked system dependencies, and other tools. Additional helpers make it easy to run R code in ‘Nix’ software environments for testing and production.

After 15 months of coding, 1364 commits, 143 closed issues, 175 closed PRs, an rOpenSci pre-review, an rOpenSci review, {rix} is finally on CRAN!

You can now install {rix} using good old install.packages(). Soon, {rix} will also be included into the nixpkgs collection of packages, meaning that you will be able to install {rix} with Nix.

Important sidenote: as it so happened, there is currently a bug in the released CRAN version that we thought we had solved, which we did, but only partially. When running rix::rix() two files should be generated: a default.nix and an .Rprofile for your project. It turns out that this file can be empty. If it is, run rix::rix_init(rprofile_action = "overwrite") to generate a proper .Rprofile. This is important, especially on Mac or if you have a system-wide library of packages! We will submit a fix asap.

If you want to watch a 5-Minute video introduction:

Btw, here is what scc has to say about the estimated cost of the project:

scc --format=html-table --avg-wage 100000 .

Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $371,264 – Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 7.59 months – Estimated People Required (organic) 2.45

Don’t hesitate to give {rix} a try and let us know how it goes!

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