A VScode Template for Dockerized R Environment

This Github repository provides a template for a dockerized R development environment with VScode and the Dev Containers extension. It contains the following folders and files:

.
├── .devcontainer
│   └── devcontainer.json
├── .vscode
│   ├── extensions.json
│   └── settings.json
├── docker
│   ├── build_base-r.sh
│   ├── build_r-dev.sh
│   ├── Dockerfile.base-r
│   ├── Dockerfile.r-dev
│   └── setting_files
│       ├── install_cli_tools.sh
│       ├── install_debian.sh
│       ├── install_packages.R
│       ├── install_python.sh
│       ├── install_quarto.sh
│       ├── packages_vscode.json
│       ├── packages.json
│       └── requirements.txt
├── README.md
├── .Rprofile
└── tests
    ├── app.R
    ├── htmlwidgets.R
    ├── plot.R
    └── shiny_run.R

It includes the following folders and files:

• .devcontainer - defines the dockerized environment settings with the devcontainer.json file
• .vscode - enables the modification of the VScode general settings for the dockerized environment with the settings.json file
• docker - contains the template image settings
• tests - R scripts for testing the environment functionality (e.g., Shiny app, static and interactive plots, etc.)

The template default image in the template is rkrispin/vscode_r_dev:0.1.0, which comes with R version 4.4.0 and core packages (e.g., dplyr, shiny, ggplot2, plotly, etc.).

Usage

To use the template, follow these steps:

• Fork this repository and clone it to your local machine.
• Updated the packages.json file, under the docker/setting_files folder, with the desired packages and versions.
• Update the build settings using the build_r-dev.sh script and build the image
• Rename the image name on the .devcontainer.json file with the new image name (e.g., rkrispin/vscode_r_dev:0.1.0)