R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS. See more at https://www.r-project.org/
The main goal of these images is to keep them minimal, so they can be used
as part of a bigger (web) application, or as a base image. Currently the
r-minimal image is less than 20MB compressed, and 32MB uncompressed.
All images use Alpine Linux.
The images include the installr tools that can install R packages from
CRAN or GitHub.
To keep the images minimal, they do not include a number of parts and features that most users would prefer to have for interactive R development:
- Recommended R packages are not installed.
- Documentation is not included.
- No X11 support.
- No Java support.
- No OpenMP support.
- No JPEG, PNG or TIFF support.
- No Cairo support.
- No Tcl/Tk support.
- No translations, only English.
- The image does not have C, C++ or Fortran compilers.
- Limited time zone data:
GMT,UTCandAmerica/New_York, see below if you need better time zone data.
Get the image from Docker Hub:
docker pull docker.io/rhub/r-minimal:latest
or from GitHub Packages:
docker pull docker.pkg.github.com/r-hub/r-minimal/r-minimal:latest
Currently we support the last patch version of the last five minor R
versions. The latest tag always uses the last R release.
| image | tags | note |
|---|---|---|
| R development version | devel |
Built daily |
| R 4.0.3 patched | 4.0.3-patched, 4.0-patched, patched |
Build daily |
| R 4.0.3 | 4.0.3, 4.0, latest |
|
| R 3.6.3 | 3.6.3, 3.6 |
|
| R 3.5.3 | 3.5.3, 3.5 |
|
| R 3.4.4 | 3.4.4, 3.4 |
|
| R 3.3.3 | 3.3.3, 3.3 |
|
| R 3.2.5 | 3.2.5, 3.2 |
One of our main goals is to be able to use rhub/r-minimal as a base
image, and easily add R packages from CRAN or GitHub to it, to create a
new image. Run installr from a Dockerfile to add R packages to
the r-minimal image:
FROM rhub/r-minimal
RUN installr praise
CMD [ "R", "--slave", "-e", "cat(praise::praise())" ]
Package with compiled code:
FROM rhub/r-minimal
RUN installr -d glue
After the package(s) have been installed, installr removed the compilers,
as these are typically not needed on the final image. If you want to keep
them use installr -c instead of installr -d.
Package with system requirements:
FROM rhub/r-minimal
RUN installr -d -t linux-headers pingr
CMD [ "R", "-q", "-e", "pingr::is_online() || stop('offline')" ]
Similarly to compilers, system packages are removed after the R packages
have been installed. If you want to keep (some of) them, use installr -a
instead of installr -t. (You can also mix the two.)
Hints on installing some popular R packages:
| package | installr command | ~ image size |
|---|---|---|
| data.table | installr -d -t zlib-dev data.table |
36.9 MB |
| dplyr | installr -d dplyr |
171.9 MB |
| ggplot2 | installr -d -t gfortran ggplot2 |
123.4 MB |
| h2o | installr -d -a openjdk10-jre -t "curl-dev musl-dev" h2o |
363.2 MB |
| knitr | installr -d knitr |
73.6 MB |
| shiny | installr -d -t "file automake autoconf" shiny |
178.0 MB |
| rmarkdown | installr -d rmarkdown |
196.8 MB (including pandoc) |
Note that package and system dependencies change over time, so if any of these commands do not work any more, please let us know.
See the [examples/rmarkdown/Dockerfile] for installing pandoc.
The image uses R's internal time zone database, but most time zones are
removed from, to save space. The only supported ones are GMT, UTC and
America/New_York. If you need more time zones, then install Alpine's
time zone package and point R to it:
apk add --no-cache tzdata
export TZDIR=/usr/share/zoneinfo
See also the discussion at r-hub#24
-
The current CRAN version (0.90.0.2) of the xgboost package does not compile on Alpine Linux. The development version on GitHub does, but
installrcannot install that until Issue #4 is fixed. Some details: dmlc/xgboost#5131 -
The arrow package are hard to install, because Alpine Linux does not have the required libraries. For the details, please see:
- r-hub#7 to install arrow
-
The prophet package needs some special handling because it depends in V8, thorugh rstan, and the system libraries needed for V7 are hard to install on Alpine. See [examples/prophet/Dockerfile] for installing an older version of rstan, that does not need V8. See also the discussion at r-hub#22
-
The CRAN version of the odbc package does not compile on Alpine Linux. There is a fix at r-dbi/odbc#400 which you can install from
gaborcsardi/odbc. See the discussion at r-hub#25 -
The CRAN version (1.3.1) or the readxl package does not compile on Alpine Linux. You can install it from GitHub:
tidyverse/readxl. For installing the tidyverse package, installtidyverse/readxlfirst, see the [examples/tidyverse/Dockerfile].
See https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/ for the R licenses
These Dockerfiles are licensed under the MIT License.
(c) R Consortium