By default, renv stores global state in the following OS-specific folders:
| Platform | Location |
| Linux | ~/.cache/R/renv |
| macOS | ~/Library/Caches/org.R-project.R/R/renv |
| Windows | %LOCALAPPDATA%/R/cache/R/renv |
If desired, this path can be customized by setting the RENV_PATHS_ROOT
environment variable. This can be useful if you'd like, for example, multiple
users to be able to share a single global cache.
Customising individual paths
The various state sub-directories can also be individually adjusted, if so desired (e.g. you'd prefer to keep the cache of package installations on a separate volume). The various environment variables that can be set are enumerated below:
| Environment Variable | Description |
RENV_PATHS_ROOT | The root path used for global state storage. |
RENV_PATHS_LIBRARY | The path to the project library. |
RENV_PATHS_LIBRARY_ROOT | The parent path for project libraries. |
RENV_PATHS_LIBRARY_STAGING | The parent path used for staged package installs. |
RENV_PATHS_SANDBOX | The path to the sandboxed R system library. |
RENV_PATHS_LOCKFILE | The path to the lockfile. |
RENV_PATHS_CELLAR | The path to the cellar, containing local package binaries and sources. |
RENV_PATHS_SOURCE | The path containing downloaded package sources. |
RENV_PATHS_BINARY | The path containing downloaded package binaries. |
RENV_PATHS_CACHE | The path containing cached package installations. |
RENV_PATHS_PREFIX | An optional prefix to prepend to the constructed library / cache paths. |
RENV_PATHS_RENV | The path to the project's renv folder. For advanced users only. |
RENV_PATHS_RTOOLS | (Windows only) The path to Rtools. |
RENV_PATHS_EXTSOFT | (Windows only) The path containing external software needed for compilation of Windows source packages. |
(If you want these settings to persist in your project, it is recommended that
you add these to an appropriate R startup file. For example, these could be
set in: a project-local .Renviron, the user-level .Renviron, or a
site-wide file at file.path(R.home("etc"), "Renviron.site"). See
Startup for more details).
Note that renv will append platform-specific and version-specific entries to the set paths as appropriate. For example, if you have set:
then the directory used for the cache will still depend on the renv cache
version (e.g. v2), the R version (e.g. 3.5) and the platform (e.g.
x86_64-pc-linux-gnu). For example:
This ensures that you can set a single RENV_PATHS_CACHE environment variable
globally without worry that it may cause collisions or errors if multiple
versions of R needed to interact with the same cache.
If reproducibility of a project is desired on a particular machine, it is highly recommended that the renv cache of installed packages + binary packages is backed up and persisted, so that packages can be easily restored in the future – installation of packages from source can often be arduous.
Sharing state across operating systems
If you need to share the same cache with multiple different Linux operating
systems, you may want to set the RENV_PATHS_PREFIX environment variable
to help disambiguate the paths used on Linux. For example, setting
RENV_PATHS_PREFIX = "ubuntu-bionic" would instruct renv to construct a
cache path like:
If this is required, it's strongly recommended that this environment
variable is set in your R installation's Renviron.site file, typically
located at file.path(R.home("etc"), "Renviron.site"), so that it can be
active for any R sessions launched on that machine.
Starting from renv 0.13.0, you can also instruct renv to auto-generate
an OS-specific component to include as part of library and cache paths,
by setting the environment variable:
The prefix will be constructed based on fields within the system's
/etc/os-release file. Note that this is the default behavior with
renv 1.0.6 when using R 4.4.0 or later.
Package cellar
If your project depends on one or more R packages that are not available in any
remote location, you can still provide a locally-available tarball for renv
to use during restore. By default, these packages should be made available in
the folder as specified by the RENV_PATHS_CELLAR environment variable. The
package sources should be placed in a file at one of these locations:
${RENV_PATHS_CELLAR}/<package>_<version>.<ext>${RENV_PATHS_CELLAR}/<package>/<package>_<version>.<ext><project>/renv/cellar/<package>_<version>.<ext><project>/renv/cellar/<package>/<package>_<version>.<ext>
where .<ext> is .tar.gz for source packages, or .tgz for binaries on
macOS and .zip for binaries on Windows. During restore(), renv will
search the cellar for a compatible package, and prefer installation with
that copy of the package if appropriate.
Older versions
Older version of renv used a different default cache location. Those cache locations are:
| Platform | Location |
| Linux | ~/.local/share/renv |
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/renv |
| Windows | %LOCALAPPDATA%/renv |
If an renv root directory has already been created in one of the old locations, that will still be used. This change was made to comply with the CRAN policy requirements of R packages.