REQ - Documentation on the use of 'renv' for reproducible environments in R

[terrymclaughlin]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Documentation is required on the use of 'renv' for reproducible environments in R

Describe what you'd like
Guidance, best practice and links to documentation on Reproducible Analytics, environments, 'renv'.

Describe alternatives you've considered
None

Additional context
Requested via the Posit Technical Group

[JFix89]

Updating to include comments from Posit support ticket #65 raised by @Moohan:

I've been getting questions from my team about migrating projects to Posit WB - there are two complications, 1) switching the R version from 3.6 -> 4.1 which can obviously be switched by just picking 3.6 if it's suspected this has caused an issue. 2) The main potential issue is that we are re-installing packages and therefore getting all the latest versions. Generally, I think this is great but is causing concern and is making issues hard to diagnose as so much has changed in one go.

I know Terry has used renv lots, and I was wondering if it would be possible to have some guidance on applying renv to an 'existing' project, meaning that when it's opened in Posit the package versions will be the same. I'm sure this is likely to add confusion for some people but it would be good to have as guidance for teams that are having particular problems with package versions, or who have particular concerns around this e.g. when migrating publication code etc.