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/
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 4.4.1) r-minimal
image is 23.74MB compressed, and 45.88MB uncompressed.
All images use Alpine Linux.
The images include the installr
tools that can install R packages from CRAN or GitHub:
❯ installr -h
Usage: ./installr [ -c | -d ] [ -e ] [ -a pkgs ] [ -t pkgs ] [ -r ] [ -p ] REMOTES ...
Options:
-c install C and C++ compilers and keep them
-d install C and C++ compilers, temporarily
-a install Alpine packages and keep them
-t install Alpine packages, temporarily
-p do not remove pak after the installation (ignored if -r is given).
-e use renv to restore the renv.lock file if present.
REMOTES may be:
* package names from CRAN/Bioconductor, e.g. ggplot2
* slugs of GitHub repos, e.g. tidyverse/ggplot2
* GitHub branch, tag or commit, e.g tidyverse/ggplot2@v1.0.0
* URLs to package .tar.gz files, e.g. url::https://x.com/pkg.tar.gz
* path to a local directory, e.g. local::.
Recent r-minimal containers use pak for R packages installation. If you have problems with pak, or need to install a package from a source that pak does not support, but the remotes package does, then install the remotes package first.
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:
GMT
, UTC
and America/New_York
, see below if you need better time zone data.Get the image from Docker Hub:
docker pull docker.io/rhub/r-minimal:latest
or from GitHub Packages:
docker pull ghcr.io/r-hub/r-minimal/r-minimal:latest
All images are available on linux/amd64
and linux/arm64
platforms.
Currently we support the last patch version of the last five minor R versions. The latest
tag always uses the last R release.
devel
, 4.6.0
, 4.6
, 4.6.0-devel
, 4.6-devel
, 2025-08-17
Built daily R next 4.5.1-Patched next
, patched
, 4.5.1-patched
, 4.5-patched
Built daily R release 4.5.1 4.5.1
, 4.5
, release
, latest
R 4.4.x 4.4.3 4.4.3
, 4.4
R 4.3.x 4.3.3 4.3.3
, 4.3
R 4.2.x 4.2.3 4.2.3
, 4.2
R 4.1.x 4.1.3 4.1.3
, 4.1
R 4.0.x 4.0.5 4.0.5
, 4.0
R 3.6.x 3.6.3 3.6.3
, 3.6
We tag our daily R-devel builds with the build date. These images can be useful for tracking down bugs and regressions in R. E.g.:
docker run -ti ghcr.io/r-hub/r-minimal/r-minimal:2022-11-25
The tags start on 2021-07-25. linux/arm64
images are available from 2022-01-13.
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.)
Using with renv:
To use renv
to restore the renv.lock
file, use the -e
option:
FROM rhub/r-minimal COPY .Rprofile .Rprofile COPY renv renv COPY renv.lock . RUN installr -d -e
If you copy the entire folder with renv, including the activate.R
and .Rprofile
, renv will bootstrap itself with the same version as the lock and restore the packages with the proper versions. All the necessary compilers and libraries needed at runtime need to be installed with the -a
and -t
options. Please refer to examples/renv-shiny for an example that install shiny and rmarkdown in a container.
Hints on installing some popular R packages:
package installr command ~ image size (uncompressed) data.table See examples/data.table for OpenMP support 26.2 MB (50.0 MB) dplyrinstallr -d dplyr
31.9 MB (59.7 MB) ggplot2 installr -d -t gfortran ggplot2
56.1 MB (93.5 MB) h2o See examples/h2o. 354.0 MB (511.0 MB) knitr installr -d knitr
25.3 MB (48.3 MB) shiny See examples/shiny. 49.8 MB (103.5 MB) sf See examples/sf. 79.7 MB (194.8 MB) plumber See examples/plumber. 56.3 MB (127.7 MB) rmarkdown installr -d rmarkdown
58.1 MB (153.5 MB) (with pandoc) tidyverse See examples/tidyverse. 113.7 MB (208.6 MB) tidyverse w/o reprex See examples/tidyverse-minimal. 66.5 MB (115.4 MB) rstan See examples/rstan. 92.0 MB (298.5 MB) xgboost installr -d -t "gfortran libexecinfo-dev" -a libexecinfo xgboost
35.5 MB (71.1 MB)
See also the Dockerfile
s in the examples
directory.
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 Dockerfile for installing pandoc.
The image uses R’s internal time zone database, but most time zones are removed from, to save space. The only supported ones are GMT
, UTC
and America/New_York
. If you need more time zones, then install Alpine’s time zone package and point R to it:
apk add --no-cache tzdata
export TZDIR=/usr/share/zoneinfo
See also the discussion at #24
Known failures and workaroundsThe ps package needs the linux-headers
Alpine package at compile time. Many tidyverse packages depend on ps, so they’ll need it as well:
installr -d -t linux-headers ps
The arrow package needs a Makevars
file to add a link flag. See the example Dockerfile
in the examples/arrow directory.
The V8 packagees do not compile on aarch64 machines by default. On x86_64 it installs fine:
installr -d -t curl-dev V8
This means that other packages that need V8 (e.g. rstan and prophet) do not work on aarch64, either.
To install the magick package, you need both the imagemagick
and imagemagick-dev
Alpine packages, both at install time and run time:
installr -d -a "imagemagick imagemagick-dev" -t "curl-dev" magick
pingr 2.0.4 does not build on Alpine, use the dev version:
installr -d -t linux-headers r-lib/pingr
Rcpp 1.0.13 does not compile with R 4.4.2. Use the dev version of Rcpp until a new version is released on CRAN. This affects all packages that depend on Rcpp, naturally. E.g. shiny, V8, rstan, odbc, golem, prophet, pagedown, plumber, sf, etc. See the updated [examples].
installr -d Rcppcore/Rcpp
See https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/ for the R licenses
These Dockerfiles are licensed under the MIT License.
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