Throughout the Epiverse project, we use the renv R package to ensure reproducibility of the training materials and the pipelines we are providing. But we sometimes get reports from users who struggle to rebuild the environment and run the code. In this post, we dissect the source of these issues, explain why in reality renv is not at fault, and how this is caused by the inherent complexity of reproducibility.

What is renv RStudio’s renv package is a powerful dependency management toolkit for R. It allows you to create a lockfile that records the exact versions of R packages used in a given project, and provides tooling to install exactly those same versions on another machine, or at a later point in time. This is very useful to create an isolated project environment for reproducibility or production purposes.