{rix} is an R package that provides functions to help you write Nix expressions: these expressions can then be used by the Nix package manager to build completely reproducible development environments. These environments can be used for interactive data analysis or running pipelines in a CI/CD environment. Environments built with Nix contain R and all the required packages that you need for your project: there are currently more than 80.000 pieces of software available through the Nix package manager, including the entirety of CRAN and Bioconductor packages. The Nix package manager is extremely powerful: it not only handles all the dependencies of any package extremely well, it is also possible with it to reproduce environments containing old releases of software. It is thus possible to build environments that contain R version 4.0.0 (for example) to run an old project originally developed on that version of R.

With Nix, it is essentially possible to replace {renv} and Docker combined. If you need other tools or languages like Python or Julia, this can also be done easily. Nix is available for Linux, macOS and Windows (via WSL2).