In this workshop, Bruno Rodrigues will introduce you to the Nix package manager, which allows for reproducible software installations. This can be used not only to install R but also R packages from CRAN, Bioconductor, or even Github. Nix takes care of installing all the dependencies for the packages, so, for example, it will install Java if a required R package depends on it, such as {rJava}. To simplify the use of Nix, a package developed by the author and his colleague Philipp Baumann, {rix}, will be utilized.

Requirements to attend: comfortable with R and the command line. Nix needs to be already installed on the participants’ machines. See here: https://github.com/b-rodrigues/rix?tab=readme-ov-file#installing-nix for detailed instructions. The {rix} package must also be installed. As it is not on CRAN yet, you must install it from its own universe. Run the following line from an R session:

install.packages(“rix”,  repos = c(“https://b-rodrigues.r-universe.dev”, “https://cloud.r-project.org”))

Lecturer: Bruno Rodrigues (PhD), statistician for the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in Luxembourg

The event is part of “Open Science – Opportunities for Educational Research”, an online series of the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education.