Rix: Reproducible Environments with Nix - Bruno Rodrigues

I will be talking about {rix}, a new package still in development that leverages the powerful Nix package manager. With Nix, it is possible to create project-specific environments that contain a project-specific version of R and R packages (as well as other tools or languages, if needed). You can use rix and Nix to replace renv and Docker with one single tool. rix provides functions to help you write and deploy Nix expressions (written in the Nix language). These expressions will be the inputs for the Nix package manager, to build sets of software packages and provide them in a reproducible development environment. These environments can be used for interactive data analysis, or reproduced when running pipelines in CI/CD systems. Environments contain R and all the required packages that you need for your project. The Nix R ecosystem currently includes almost the entirety of CRAN and Bioconductor packages. Like with any other programming language and software, it is also possible to install older releases of R packages, or install packages from GitHub at defined states. Bruno Rodrigues, Ministry of Research and Higher Education Bruno is currently employed as the head of the statistics department at the Ministry of Research Higher education in Luxembourg. Before joining the public sector, Bruno worked as a data science consultant in one of the big four accounting companies, and before that as a teaching and research assistant. Bruno discovered tools such as Git and software carpentry techniques while working on his PhD.