I was trying to use r-minimal image on an HPC cluster at my university, which the scheduler that only accepts docker-based jobs. To decrease the start-up time I want to use the vanilla r-minimal image and have installed packages to be stored on the file system and mounted to docker container as a volume. However, it turned out that I can't use installr script to install packages to the docker volume since the docker jobs on cluster are executed under low-privileged user, while root access is required for installr to work.

As a workaround I created an r-minimal based docker image with compilers preinstalled. That way I can use it to install packages via R's install.packages, and use vanilla r-minimal to run the scripts. I'm not sure how this scenario could be useful to other people, but in case it is, I would suggest to create a separate docker image with some build dependencies. The following Dockerfile worked well for me (to install RcppParallel and Matrix packages):

from rhub/r-minimal:4.4.1
RUN installr -c -a "linux-headers gfortran"

Alternatively, and probably a more systematic solution, would be to make installr work without root permissions, but I'm not sure if it's possible. Unfortunately I also not sure how to reproduce this behavior locally: it's probably a version of a rootless docker, but I don't know the details.