Anatomy of a Lockfile

renv uses a lockfile to capture the state of your library at some point in time. It is stored as a collection of records, with different records defining:

• The version of renv used when generating the lockfile;
• The version of R used in that project;
• The R repositories that were active when the lockfile was created;
• Package records defining each R package, their version, and their installation source.

Here is an example lockfile, including the packages markdown and mime:

{
  "R": {
    "Version": "4.2.3",
    "Repositories": [
      {
        "Name": "CRAN",
        "URL": "https://cloud.r-project.org"
      }
    ]
  },
  "Packages": {
    "markdown": {
      "Package": "markdown",
      "Version": "1.0",
      "Source": "Repository",
      "Repository": "CRAN",
      "Hash": "4584a57f565dd7987d59dda3a02cfb41"
    },
    "mime": {
      "Package": "mime",
      "Version": "0.7",
      "Source": "Repository",
      "Repository": "CRAN",
      "Hash": "908d95ccbfd1dd274073ef07a7c93934"
    }
  }
}

The function renv::snapshot() is used to create this lockfile, and by default writes these records to the file renv.lock. Later, if you need to reinstall the specific package versions as recorded in renv.lock, you can use renv::restore().

Package Records

Package records are created using the currently-installed copies of packages as a “source of truth”. The fields written into each package record are derived from the installed package’s DESCRIPTION file.

Note that the package records created from packages installed using pak::pkg_install() may have a format different from a package installed with utils::install.packages(). This is because pak writes out a variety of other metadata into the package DESCRIPTION file after installation, including a number of Remote fields that further describe where the package was retrieved from, and the type of package that was installed.