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CircleCI license

Version-stable Rocker images

rocker

image description size metrics build status
r-ver Version-stable base R & src build tools
rstudio Adds rstudio
tidyverse Adds tidyverse & devtools
verse Adds tex & publishing-related packages

This repository provides alternate stack to r-base, rocker/rstudio, rocker/hadleyverse series, with an emphasis on reproducibility. Compared to those images, this stack:

  • builds on the stable debian:jessie release instead of debian:testing, so no more apt-get breaking when debian:testing repos are updated and you had to muck with -t unstable to get apt-get to work.
  • Further, this stack installs a fixed version of R itself from source, rather than whatever is already packaged for Debian (the r-base stack gets the latest R version as a binary from debian:unstable),
  • and it installs all R packages from a fixed snapshot of CRAN at a given date (MRAN repos).
  • provides images that are generally smaller than the r-base series

Users should include the version tag, e.g. rocker/verse:3.3.1 when reproduciblity is paramount, and use the default latest tag, e.g. rocker/verse for the most up-to-date R packages. All images still receive any Debian security patch updates. Note that any debian packages on these images (C libraries, compilers, etc) will likely be older/earlier versions than those found on the r-base image series.

Version Tags

Using the R version tag will naturally lock the R version, and also lock the install date of any R packages on the image. For example, rocker/tidyverse:3.3.1 Docker image will always rebuild with R 3.3.1 and R packages installed from the 2016-10-31 snapshot of CRAN, matching the last day that version was current, while rocker/tidyverse:latest will always have both the latest R version and latest versions of the R packages. Note that packages installed by a user (e.g. with install.packages() either interactively or via downstream Dockerfiles) will still install the latest versions from the RStudio CRAN mirror by default. To install additional packages from the same CRAN snapshot as used on the tidyverse image (e.g. to decrease the chance of package incompatibilities), users must explicitly specify that MRAN repo, which is stored for reference in /etc/environment. See the rocker/verse Dockerfile for an example of this. New tags will be added with new R releases, with snapshot date being fixed when those Dockerfiles are created.

Images

The image rocker/r-ver is the functional equivalent of r-base, though slightly pared down. Currently r-ver has tags for all minor R versions back to 3.1.0 (as far back as MRAN snapshots of CRAN are avialable); see all tags. Users can attempt to build other versions from the r-ver Dockerfile by specifying --build-arg R_VERSION=<VERSION>, though this is unlikely to work with very old R versions. Likewise, all non-current images are automatically pinned to a MRAN snapshot of CRAN from the last day that version was current. Users can set a custom snapshot date for the r-ver images by using --build-arg BUILD_DATE=<DATE> when building that Dockerfile.

The image rocker/tidyverse is the functional equivalent of rocker/hadleyverse, minus the LaTeX part which is moved into a downstream rocker/verse in order to keep the tidyverse image more compact. Now that tidyverse is a thing, the term "hadleyverse" is on the way out.

The rocker/rstudio image builds with RStudio v1.0.44 by default. This can be customized by specifying the desired version in --build-arg RSTUDIO_VERSION=<VERSION> if building locally from its Dockerfile. Note that: rocker/rstudio:latest is the only image name in this stack that already existed. For consistency, rocker/rstudio:latest now builds on r-ver:latest instead of r-base:latest. This change may break downstream images, which should either build explicitly on the debian:testing stack by using the testing tag (rocker/rstudio:testing) or be patched to support this change.

image Dockerfiles
r-ver
rstudio
tidyverse
verse

Maintenance and Updates

These images are actively maintained. This means that while an effort is made to preserve the general function of these images over time, both these Dockerfiles and the resulting images are subject to some change over time. In particular:

  • Images are regularly re-built on Docker Hub whenever their base image changes, starting with changes to debian Docker image. This is the rough equivalent of running apt-get upgrade on debian:jessie, since all apt-get commands are re-run and will pull in the most current sources. This allows the images to receive security updates to any packages installed from the debian:jessie repositories, but will not in general change the versions of any software and is very unlikely to break anything.

  • The Dockerfiles themselves are subject to change, to improve performance, ease of use, readability, or other concerns raised in the issues. These changes should also not alter the general behavior of R or R packages on the image. These changes can be seen in the git history. The rocker-versioned repo will use its own semantic version tagging to indicate changes to this repository, with snapshots from these tags archived on Zenodo.