Creating a portable version of R for Mac (and installing package from source for this version)

Question

I am trying to create a completely portable version of R for Mac that I can send to users with no R on their system and they can essentially double click a command file and it launches a Shiny application. I'll need to be able to install packages including some built from source (and some from GitHub).

I am using the script from this GitHub repository ( https://github.com/dirkschumacher/r-shiny-electron/blob/master/get-r-mac.sh ) as a starting point (it's also pasted below), creating a version of R, but (A) I find that when I try to launch R it gives me an error not finding etc/ldpaths and (B) when I try to launch Rscript it runs my system version -- I run `Rscript -e 'print(R.version)' and it prints out 4.0 which is my system version of R rather than the version 3.5.1 which the shell script has downloaded and processed.

I've experimented with editing the "R" executable and altering R_HOME and R_HOME_DIR but it still runs into issues when I try to install packages to the 3.5.1 directory.

Can anyone provide some guidance?

(By the way docker is not an option, this needs to be as simple as possible end-users with limited technical skills. So having them install docker etc won't be an option)

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e

# Download and extract the main Mac Resources directory
# Requires xar and cpio, both installed in the Dockerfile
mkdir -p r-mac
curl -o r-mac/latest_r.pkg \
     https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/macosx/R-3.5.1.pkg

cd r-mac
xar -xf latest_r.pkg
rm -r r-1.pkg Resources tcltk8.pkg texinfo5.pkg Distribution latest_r.pkg
cat r.pkg/Payload | gunzip -dc | cpio -i
mv R.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/* .
rm -r r.pkg R.framework

# Patch the main R script
sed -i.bak '/^R_HOME_DIR=/d' bin/R
sed -i.bak 's;/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources;${R_HOME};g' \
    bin/R
chmod +x bin/R
rm -f bin/R.bak

# Remove unneccessary files TODO: What else
rm -r doc tests
rm -r lib/*.dSYM

Answer 1

Happy to help you get this working for your shiny app. You can use this github repo for Electron wrapping R/Shiny... just clone, and replace the app.R (for your other packages you need to install them in the local R folder after cloning and then running R from the command line out of the R-Portable-Mac/bin folder...

Try it with the Hello World app.R that is included first

https://github.com/ColumbusCollaboratory/electron-quick-start

And, then installing your packages in the local R-Portable-Mac folder runtime. Included packages by default... https://github.com/ColumbusCollaboratory/electron-quick-start/tree/master/R-Portable-Mac/library Your packages will show up here after install.packages() from the command line using the local R-Mac-Portable runtime.

We have been working on a R Addin for this also... https://github.com/ColumbusCollaboratory/photon

But, note the add-in is still a work in progress and doesn't work with compiled R packages; still have to go into the local R folder and runtime on the command line and install the packages directly into the local R folder libpath as discussed above.

Give it a try and let us know through Github issues if you have any questions and issues. And, if you've already posted out there, sorry we haven't responded as of yet. Would love to communicate through the photon Add-In for this to get it working with compiling packages (into the libPath)--if you have the time to help. Thanks!