pracpac: Practical R Packaging with Docker

Abstract

R packages are the fundamental units of reproducible code in R, providing a mechanism for distributing user-developed code, documentation, and data. Docker is a virtualization technology that allows applications and their dependencies to be distributed and run reproducibly across platforms. The pracpac package provides an interface to create Docker images that contain custom R packages. The pracpac package leverages the renv package management tool to ensure reproducibility by building dependency packages inside the container image mirroring those installed on the developer's system. The pracpac package can be used to containerize any R package to deploy with other domain-specific non-R tools, Shiny applications, or entire data analysis pipelines. The pracpac package is available on CRAN (https://cran.r-project.org/package=pracpac), and source code is available under the MIT license on GitHub (https://github.com/signaturescience/pracpac).