• Experimental!
• TL;DR
• The evercran CRAN snapshots
• Interactive R shell on GitHub Actions
• R 0.0 (alpha-test) – R 2.5.1
• R 2.6.0 – R 2.8.1
• R 2.9.0 – R 2.12.2
• R 2.13.0 – R 2.15.3
• R 3.0.0 – R 4.6.1
• Containers with multiple R versions
• List of all containers
• Frequently asked questions
• Similar projects, inspiration
• Thanks!
• License

Note that these containers are currently experimental!

Found a bug? Please let us know! Thanks!

docker pull ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/1.0.0
docker run -ti ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/1.0.0

R : Copyright 2000, The R Development Core Team
Version 1.0.0  (February 29, 2000)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type    "?license" or "?licence" for distribution details.

R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type    "?contributors" for a list.

Type    "demo()" for some demos, "help()" for on-line help, or
        "help.start()" for a HTML browser interface to help.
Type    "q()" to quit R.

>

The evercran project has daily CRAN snapshots, starting from the very beginning up to today. The URLs are of the form

http://evercran.r-pkg.org/YYYY/MM/DD
https://evercran.r-pkg.org/YYYY/MM/DD

and they start at 1999/01/01.

Package downloads are redirected to CRAN, so you will need an R download method that follows redirection.

All the evercran containers (from R 0.65.1) in this repository are already set up to an appropriate evercran snapshot: they use the date of the next R release. (Except for the container of the latest R release, of course, that uses a regular CRAN mirror instead of a snapshot.)

To use an evercran snapshot on a different R installation, this should work on all R versions, as of today:

options(CRAN = "http://evercran.r-pkg.org/2010/10/10")
options(repos = c(CRAN = "http://evercran.r-pkg.org/2010/10/10"))
options(download.file.method = "wget")

Modify the URLs to use the snapshot date you’d like. Add this to the ~/.Rprofile file. You’ll also need to install wget for the downloads to work. You can use a https URL if your wget installation supports https.

You can also run any R version interactively on GitHub Actions, using the r-hub/evercran-shell repository. You only need an SSH client for this. See r-hub/evercran-shell for the details.

docker pull ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/<version>
docker run -ti ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/<version>

These containers use Debian 3.1 (Sarge). Notes:

• All containers use the linux/i386 architecture.

• While wget and curl have HTTPS support, in practice HTTPS does not work because of certificate errors.

• You can use the HTTP (not HTTPS!) PPA at https://ppa.r-pkg.org/evercran/ to install more R versions:

  echo 'deb http://ppa.r-pkg.org/evercran sarge main' \
    >> /etc/apt/sources.list
  apt-get update -y
  apt-get install -y r-1.0.0

• The Debian R packages are also available as GitHub Releases, in the https://github.com/r-hub/R repository, e.g.: https://github.com/r-hub/R/releases/tag/v1.0.0 (But you cannot directly download these from the containers, because of the broken HTTPS. Use the PPA to download them.)

docker pull ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/<version>
docker run -ti ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/<version>

These containers use Debian 4.0 (Etch). Notes:

• All containers use the linux/i386 architecture.

• While wget and curl have HTTPS support, in practice HTTPS does not work well, because they use TLS v1, which is not supported by many servers.

• You can use the HTTP (not HTTPS!) PPA at https://ppa.r-pkg.org/evercran/ to install more R versions:

  echo 'deb http://ppa.r-pkg.org/evercran etch main' \
    >> /etc/apt/sources.list
  curl -L http://ppa.r-pkg.org/rhub.gpg.key | apt-key add -
  apt-get update -y
  apt-get install -y r-2.6.0

• The Debian R packages are also available as GitHub Releases, in the https://github.com/r-hub/R repository, e.g.: https://github.com/r-hub/R/releases/tag/v2.6.0 (But you cannot directly download these from the containers, because of the broken HTTPS. Use the PPA to download them.)

docker pull ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/<version>
docker run -ti ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/<version>

These containers use Debian 5.0.10 (Lenny). Notes:

• All containers use the linux/i386 architecture.

• While wget and curl have HTTPS support, in practice HTTPS does not work well, because they use TLS v1, which is not supported by many servers.

• You can use the HTTP (not HTTPS!) PPA at https://ppa.r-pkg.org/evercran/ to install more R versions:

  echo 'deb http://ppa.r-pkg.org/evercran lenny main' \
    >> /etc/apt/sources.list
  curl -L http://ppa.r-pkg.org/rhub.gpg.key | apt-key add -
  apt-get update -y
  apt-get install -y r-2.9.0

• The Debian R packages are also available as GitHub Releases, in the https://github.com/r-hub/R repository, e.g.: https://github.com/r-hub/R/releases/tag/v2.9.0 (But you cannot directly download these from the containers, because of the broken HTTPS. Use the PPA to download them.)

docker pull ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/<version>
docker run -ti ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/<version>

These containers use Debian 6.0.10 (Squeeze). Notes:

• All containers use the linux/i386 architecture.

• While wget and curl have HTTPS support, in practice HTTPS does not work well, because they use TLS v1, which is not supported by many servers.

• You can use the HTTP (not HTTPS!) PPA at https://ppa.r-pkg.org/evercran/ to install more R versions:

  echo 'deb http://ppa.r-pkg.org/evercran squeeze main' \
    >> /etc/apt/sources.list
  curl -L http://ppa.r-pkg.org/rhub.gpg.key | apt-key add -
  apt-get update -y
  apt-get install -y r-2.13.0

• The Debian R packages are also available as GitHub Releases, in the https://github.com/r-hub/R repository, e.g.: https://github.com/r-hub/R/releases/tag/v2.13.0 (But you cannot directly download these from the containers, because of the broken HTTPS. Use the PPA to download them.)

docker pull ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/<version>
docker run -ti ghcr.io/r-hub/evercran/<version>

R 3.0.0 – R 4.6.0 use Debian 12.1 (Bookworm). R 4.6.1 and later use Debian 13 (Trixie), because rstudio/r-builds does not provide Debian 12 packages for these versions. Notes:

• All containers are available with linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 architectures.

• The amd64 Debian packages are available from https://github.com/rstudio/r-builds.

• The arm64 Debian packages are available from the GitHub Releases at the https://github.com/r-hub/R repository E.g. https://github.com/r-hub/R/releases/tag/v4.3.1.

• To install additional R versions (or to install in a plain debian:12 container), download it with wget or curl, and install it with apt install ./<filename>. E.g.:

  apt-get update
  apt-get install -y curl
  curl -LO https://github.com/r-hub/R/releases/download/v4.3.1/r-rstudio-debian-12-4.3.1_1_arm64.deb
  apt install -y ./r-rstudio-debian-12-4.3.1_1_arm64.deb
  /opt/R/4.3.1/bin/R

For convenience we have containers that include many R versions installed.

All R versions are installed in /opt/R/<version>, so you can run one with

/opt/R/<version>/bin/R

For example to run R 0.65.1:

/opt/R/0.65.1/bin/R

> list.files("/opt/R")
character(0)

docker exec -it <container> entrypoint.sh bash

• rcheology – Data on Base Packages for Previous Versions of R
• rang – (Re)constructing R computational environments

• debian/eol – End of Life Debian versions (pointing at archive.debian.org)
• Posit’s https://github.com/rstudio/r-builds project.

See https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/ for the R licenses

The Dockerfiles and tools in this repository are licensed under the MIT License.

© R Consortium