Minimal Docker images for R

What is R?

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/

Goals and features

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.

Limitations

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 readline library support.
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.

Usage

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

Supported R versions

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 4.0.2 patched	`4.0.2-patched`, `4.0-patched`, `patched`	Build daily
R 4.0.2	`4.0.2`, `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`

Dockerfile examples

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.)

Popular packages:

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
prophet	`installr -d -t "gfortran linux-headers" prophet`	389.7 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.

Known failures

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 installr cannot install that until Issue #4 is fixed. Some details: dmlc/xgboost#5131
The arrow package is hard to install, because Alpine Linux does not have the required libraries. Please see r-hub#7 for the details.

License

See https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/ for the R licenses

These Dockerfiles are licensed under the MIT License.

artemklevtsov / r-minimal