How to activate renv in notebook

[petetronic]

Logging an issue from a discussion to consider an enhancement for renv management for notebooks in subfolders, and whether the "project" level environment should be set for those notebook sessions automatically if found.

Discussed in #4687

^{Originally posted by rbudnar September 14, 2024}
Hi all!

My apologies if this is answered elsewhere or if I'm just missing something obvious (I'm a bit of a newcomer to R as well, coming from python). I was testing out using Jupyter notebooks in positron and I was wondering if it is possible to use the local renv for packages. Renvs work great in R scripts without me having to do anything, but in a notebook context it doesn't find my renv-installed packages (where my notebook is under the src folder). After messing around for a while, this looks like it worked inside my notebook:

setwd("..") # need to go up a directory first, otherwise renv::activate will create a new renv in the current folder
renv::activate()
.libPaths(renv::paths$library())

My question is - is there a better way to do this? Messing around with paths can get clunky, especially if I need to move things around.

Thank you!

[juliasilge]

I chatted with Kevin on this and will share some details, for example on how RStudio handles rendering .Rmd (which also use their own location as the working directory):

The main thing RStudio does here is ensure that the current library paths are forwarded to the child R process invoking rmarkdown::render() via the R_LIBS environment variable, so that the library paths are “inherited” by the child process

We would want to do something that is in spirit similar to:

• start a session from the workspace root to let renv set R_LIBS and option around repos
• start a notebook session that inherits these values of R_LIBS, repos, etc