R Package Management Guide

  • Article

Applies to: DeployR 8.x (See comparison between 8.x and 9.x)

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Introduction

As the DeployR administrator, one of your responsibilities is to ensure the R code that runs on the DeployR server has access to the R package dependencies declared within that code. The following sections discuss R package management in this context.

By adopting one or both of the R package management approaches described below, your data scientists can avoid issues where a script they've tested locally now fails due to missing package dependencies when executed in the DeployR server environment.

Guideline: Assign the appropriate permissions for packaging installations and/or install the packages on behalf of your users with deployrPackage().

Centralized Management

One option is to install a fixed set of default packages across the DeployR grid on behalf of your users. This can be done in a number of ways.

One such approach is to use a master R script that contains all required package dependency declarations for the DeployR server as follows:

  1. In your local environment:

    1. Install deployrUtils locally from GitHub using your IDE, R console, or terminal window with the following commands:

      library(devtools)
install_github('Microsoft/deployrUtils')

    2. Create a master R script that you'll use to install the package dependencies across the DeployR grid.

    3. At the top of that script, declare each package dependency individually using deployrPackage(). For the full function help, use library(help="deployrUtils") in your IDE.

  2. In your remote DeployR server environment:

    1. Manually run this R script on a DeployR grid node.

    2. Repeat previous step by running the master script manually on every grid node machine. Running this script on each grid node ensures the full set of packages is installed and available on each node.

You will have to update and manually rerun this script on each node on the DeployR grid whenever a new package needs to be added to the server environment.

Decentralized Management

Another option is to assign permissions for R package installation to select users. Then, these select users can install the packages they need directly within their code. When you've explicitly assigned the PACKAGE_MANAGER role to users, they are granted permissions to install R packages via deployrUtils::deployrPackage().

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Also note that the ADMINISTRATOR and POWER_USER roles have implicit PACKAGE_MANAGER rights, while BASIC_USER does not. Read more on default roles...