LOS! Workshop: Reproducible research with Nix and rix

This event is a part of LOS! (Leibniz Open Science!), the event series of the Leibniz Strategy Forum on Open Science. The workshop was held online, on May 16, 2024.

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”)).