This repository contains a Nix expression for building R-devel from source. If you have Nix installed on your Linux or Mac computer, it will allow you to reproducibly build an run R-devel, without requiring you to do a permanent installation of it on your system.

First, install Nix with flakes enabled. The easiest way to do this is to use the Determinate Systems Nix installer. (Note that this installer also has the ability to completely uninstall itself.)

Next, build R-devel.

nix build github:wch/r-devel-nix -L

The -L will cause the build logs to be printed to the terminal; if you don't want to see that information, omit -L.

Build times:

• On a Mac with an M1 Pro, this takes about 6 minutes.
• On a Linux computer with an AMD Ryzen 5 5560U, this takes about 4 minutes.

Once it is built, you can run R-devel in a few different ways

This will run R-devel directly:

nix run github:wch/r-devel-nix

Or you can start a shell with R-devel available:

nix shell github:wch/r-devel-nix
R

To update the hashes for r-source and the recommended packages, run:

scripts/update-all.sh

If there were any changes, you can commit them to the repository.