sysreqs
SystemRequirements for R packages
Introduction
Many R packages require system libraries or other external software to build
or run. The SystemRequirements
field in the package DESCRIPTION
file should
declare these dependencies, as free form text. This makes it difficult to
automate building and checking of R packages, since we need to guess which
software should be installed on the build machine.
The sysreqs
project formalizes these requirements, and provides a database
with API to quickly find out which Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL/Centos, etc
packages or other software needs to be available to build and use R packages.
In this README:
- supported platforms
- the database format
- how to contribute
- how to access the data
- where the
sysreqs
project is used
Supported platforms
Distributions using deb
package format:
- Ubuntu Linux
- Debian Linux
Distributions using rpm
package format:
- Fedora Linux (recent releases)
- RedHat and CentOS Linux (recent releases)
Distributions using the PKGBUILD
package format:
- Arch Linux
Non-native package formats:
- HomeBrew package manager on MacOS
- Pacman/Rtools on Windows (forthcoming)
Database format
The sysreqs
database is a JSON document store. Each document contains
mappings for a single canonical system requirement. It contains both
the mappings to SystemRequirements
fields, and platform dependent packages
or URLs.
Below an example to make this clear. Several R packages require the libxml2
library. For building these packages from source, the libxml2 development
headers are needed as well. The R packages refer to libxml2 in different
ways. E.g. igraph
has simply libxml2
and XML
has libxml2 (>= 2.6.3)
in their SystemRequirements
fields.
{
"libxml2": {
"sysreqs": "libxml2",
"platforms": {
"DEB": "libxml2-dev",
"OSX/brew": null,
"RPM": "libxml2-devel"
}
}
}
Some notes:
- The
sysreqs
field can be a string or array, and its entries can be fixed strings or regular expressions (when starting and ending with a forward slash, only JavaScript RegExp are supported. Example of a listsysreqs
field, example of asysreqs
field with a regular expression. - Not all platforms have the same information, For
DEB
based Linux flavours (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) packages that can be installed via the host package manager are listed:DEB
line example. For Windows, typically URLs that have to be downloaded and installed: Windows lines example. null
forOSX/brew
means that nothing is needed, the system includes the requirement(s) by default. Example.
Database access
See API docs at https://sysreqs.r-hub.io/
Contributing
Your contributions are welcome! More details below.
Adding or completing entries
Please read about the data format first. Entries should be added or improved via pull requests.
-
If a package (of yours or not) has a dependency that's not listed here yet, open a pull request to add it. You don't need to have it mapped to all platforms yet. Example of such a PR.
-
You can also make a pull request to add a mapping to a platform. Example of such a PR.
Reporting your use case
If you maintain a public platform/tool using sysreqsdb, make a PR to this repo updating the section below. Please put your tool at the very end of the list.
Use cases of the database
-
The
codemetar
package, R package for the CodeMeta project, uses the sysreqs API to parse the SystemRequirements field. -
The
containerit
package uses the sysreqs API to derive system requirements of packages for automatically creating a Dockerfile based on a collection of packages.
License
MIT Β© The R Consortium