Containers
The rocker project provides container images for R since several years. Since recently, the images are multi-arch, i.e. arm64 is supported alongside amd64.
Yet, other distributions than Ubuntu are missing and don’t use the devXY binaries out of the box. To simplify running containers that make use of the devXY R binaries implicitly, the following images are provided:
These have the devXY repositories configured by default and can be used efficiently without further configuration changes.
In contrast to the minimal rocker/r-ver images, the r-ubuntu images contain a few additional system libraries which are essential for troublefree R usage.
The following screencast shows how quickly the r-alpine image can be used to install the full {tidyverse} package universe in just under 30s:
The performance of this screencast (and your local experience) depends on a few factors: local download speed, cached binaries in the CDN, proximity to a local edge node of the CDN and your CPU performance and finally the Ncpus option in R, defining how many installations are performed in parallel (by default 1).