Using git_pkgs on Windows (not WSL)

[JonathanMatthewSamson]

I'm currently part of a team that runs pipelines through R, and would like to use rix to be able to go back to old versions of that pipeline. The team runs rstudio on Windows, and I would like to impact their normal workflows as little as possible - I would like to avoid forcing them to open new projects in WSL. It is acceptable, however, to ask them to use WSL to access old projects, and my plan is to have NIX installed there

I see that it is stated that Windows (sans WSL) can be used to generate default.nix files, and I can get that to work without the git_pkgs option, I get an error message that Nix isn't installed. It seems that {nix_sri_hash} is causing this error. I am not familiar with NIX, but is this hash absolutely necessary?

[b-rodrigues]

Thanks for giving rix a try! Yes this hash is mandatory. As stated in the details section of rix help:

{rix} automatically precomputes this hash for the source directory of R packages from GitHub/Gitlab or from the CRAN archives, to make sure the expected trusted sources that match the precomputed hashes in the default.nix are downloaded, but only if Nix is installed. If you need to generate an expression with such packages, but are working on a system where you can't install Nix, consider generating the expression using a continuous integration service, such as GitHub Actions.

Why generate the expression on windows and not on the system on which the pipeline will run ?

[JonathanMatthewSamson]

Considering this, I was thinking that the expression needed to be generated when the pipeline started; but I think it would work just as well if it is generated only on the rerun. Thank you!

[b-rodrigues]

Exactly, you can start by generating the default.nix at the beginning of the pipeline and then build it. See for example here where I drop into a temporary Nix shell and then generate the default.nix from the gen-env.R script : https://github.com/b-rodrigues/rixpress_demos/blob/9da166b7f1ce4a1d9da755848d431d0c33dadaa2/.github/workflows/basic_r.yaml#L43

then I run the pipeline. This is also what I do in the pipeline here inside Docker https://docs.ropensci.org/rix/articles/z-advanced-topic-using-nix-inside-docker.html