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 4.1.0) r-minimal image is less than 21MB compressed, and 35.4MB
uncompressed.
All images use Alpine Linux.
The images include the installr tools that can install R packages from
CRAN or GitHub:
❯ installr -h
Usage: ./installr [ -c | -d ] [ -a pkgs ] [ -t pkgs ] [ -r ] [ -p ] REMOTES ...
Options:
-c install C and C++ compilers and keep them
-d install C and C++ compilers, temporarily
-a install Alpine packages and keep them
-t install Alpine packages, temporarily
-p do not remove pak after the installation (ignored if -r is given).
REMOTES may be:
* package names from CRAN/Bioconductor, e.g. ggplot2
* slugs of GitHub repos, e.g. tidyverse/ggplot2
* GitHub branch, tag or commit, e.g tidyverse/ggplot2@v1.0.0
* URLs to package .tar.gz files, e.g. url::https://x.com/pkg.tar.gz
* path to a local directory, e.g. local::.
Recent r-minimal containers use pak (https://github.com/r-lib/pak) for R packages installation. If you have problems with pak, or need to install a package from a source that pak does not support, but the remotes package does, then install the remotes package first.
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 4.1.2 | 4.1.2, 4.1, latest |
|
| R 4.1.2 patched | 4.1.2-patched, 4.1-patched, patched |
Built daily |
| R 4.0.5 | 4.0.5, 4.0 |
|
| 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 data.table |
39.1 MB |
| dplyr | installr -d dplyr |
47.8 MB |
| ggplot2 | installr -d -t gfortran ggplot2 |
82.1 MB |
| h2o | See examples/h2o. |
408.0 MB |
| knitr | installr -d knitr |
79.2 MB |
| shiny | See examples/shiny. |
84.1 MB |
| plumber | See examples/plumber. |
103.1 MB |
| rmarkdown | installr -d rmarkdown |
161.3 MB (including pandoc) |
| rstan | See examples/rstan. |
344.4 MB |
| tidyverse | See examples/tidyverse. |
302.5 MB |
| xgboost | installr -d -t "gfortran libexecinfo-dev" -a libexecinfo xegboost |
59.9 MB |
See also the Dockerfiles in the examples directory.
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 arrow package are hard to install, because Alpine Linux does not have the required libraries. For the details, please see: r-hub#7
-
The V8 package does not compile on Alpine Linux by default. Luckily, you can now download a static binary of V8:
DOWNLOAD_STATIC_LIBV8=1 installr -d -t curl-dev V8 -
The prophet package depens on V8, through rstan, and you can use the same trick to install it:
DOWNLOAD_STATIC_LIBV8=1 installr -d -t "linux-headers gfortran curl-dev" prophet -
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]. -
To install the magick package, you need both the
imagemagickandimagemagick-devAlpine packages, both at install time and run time:installr -d -a "imagemagick imagemagick-dev" -t "curl-dev" magick
See https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/ for the R licenses
These Dockerfiles are licensed under the MIT License.
(c) R Consortium