Add Packages to your Renku Project Environment

The process for adding packages to your Renku project is a little different depending on which language you are using- for example Python or R. Alternatively, for both R and Python, you may use conda’s environment management system. All three of these options work with Renku.

Select the tab below for the documentation relevant to you.

Python

Add packages to your project dependencies

To add packages to your environment, add the packages to the dependencies file. When you’re working in Python, this is the requirements.txt file.

To add your project’s dependencies to requirements.txt, simply list the package names. Optionally, you may specify specific package versions, as shown in the example below.

pandas
numpy==1.22.0

Install the packages

Install the packages you listed in the dependency file by running the following command in the terminal:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

R

Add packages to your project dependencies

To add packages to your environment, add the packages to the dependencies file. When you’re working in R, it’s install.R.

To specify your project dependencies in install.R, write the R package install commands. This install.R script will be sourced and run to create your requested environment.

install.packages(c("dplyr", "ggplot2"))

Note that the base R install.packages function can only install the latest version of a package on CRAN. To install a specific version, use devtools::install_version. If the package is not on CRAN and exists as a github repo, you can use install_github instead. These two scenarios are shown in the example below.

devtools::install_version("ggplot2",
            version = "3.3.6",
            repos = "http://cran.us.r-project.org",
            upgrade="always")
devtools::install_github("thomasp85/patchwork")

Install the packages

Install the packages you listed in the dependency file by running the following command in the terminal:

$ R -f install.R

conda

Add packages to your project dependencies

To add packages to your environment, add the packages to the dependencies file. When you’re using conda, it’s environment.yml.

To add your project’s dependencies to environment.yml, specify an environment name and then a list of dependencies.

name: stats
dependencies:
- numpy
- pandas

For more details, see conda’s documentation.

Install the packages

Install the packages you listed in the dependency file by running the following command in the terminal:

$ conda env update --file environment.yml  --prune

Save your changes

After you’ve modified your project’s dependencies, make sure to save your changes so that the packages will automatically be installed the next time you start a Renku session.

$ renku save -m "updated dependencies"

The next time you start a renku session, the packages will already be installed for you.

Looking for more options?

If you’d like to further customize your Renku project environment, take a look at Customizing sessions and Docker and Renku.