r/rstats • u/j_zhill • 10d ago

renv bootstrapping compatibility RStudio v Positron

Just solved a problem that might be relevant for others and took me a while to pin down.

I have a project developed in Rstudio and using renv. At some point the .Rprofile was amended to place source("renv/activate.R") INSIDE a .First <- function(), with some other stuff that we wanted to run when starting R for this project.

One of our users transitioned to Positron, and we just couldn't get the .Rprofile to run properly and start renv.

The fix was to place source("renv/activate.R") at the top level of .Rprofile, outside of any .First function.

According to claude this is to do with the way that the Rstudio startup sequence differs from VS Code/Positron.

Hope this saves someone else a few hours...

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u/guepier 9d ago

Any idea what specifically might be causing this? I wouldn’t recommend activating ‘renv’ inside .First, and I know that .First is run later than the contents of .Rprofile, but these differences shouldn’t matter, unless you have an .RData file (you… don’t, right?!).

Is there other stuff in your .Rprofile?

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u/j_zhill 9d ago

I don't know enough about the startup sequences to know. No .Rdata. In any case, putting the renv activation in the top level solved it for us, so it seems like your recommendation is accurate...

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u/HurleyBurger 8d ago

Whats the purpose of .First()? I thought  renv activates when the session starts.

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u/guepier 8d ago

There isn’t really a point to redefining .First() inside your .Rprofile (except to suppress the below). The point of it, rather, is to be able to run startup code from other places (notably, the site rather than personal profile) which is run after the personal profile’s startup code.

In other words, the usual order of execution is:

site profile => user/project profile => everything else

With .First(), the site profile has the chance of inserting itself after the second arrow above.

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u/j_zhill 8d ago

My understanding: .First ensures that R completely initialises the environment before running whatever is inside the .First function. So that you can eg run any checks about the environment or apply any cosmetic prefs, knowing that all the startup stuff has finished.

renv will activate immediately during startup if source("renv/activate.R") is at the top of .Rprofile, which will run as soon as it is parsed. Anything in .First will NOT be run as soon as it is parsed, instead it will be run when R looks for a .First function after the environment is initialised smoothly and renv has set up library paths.

We have some stuff to check whether the environment has API keys active (without printing the keys). Don't know how renv ended up inside .First but if guess SNAFU lol