RStudio Connect Missing Package Suggests

Posit Professional & Hosted Products Posit Connect
1

A Shiny application that I created required an internal team created package that wasn't yet available on our RStudio Server while we are waiting for our data engineering team to setup Package Manager. The functionality requiring that package was not essential (only used for one of multiple tabItems) so I placed the package in 'Suggests' in the Shiny (golem) applications DESCRIPTION file & used if statement to check for the package availability within the code.

However, when pushing the application to RStudio Connect (via the blue button on my Shiny applications 'App.R' file) I received an error message similar to the following:

Uploading bundle for application: ##...Warning in FUN(X[[i]], ...) : Unable to find repository URL for package ######

To me that feels like it should be a bug because intuitively, I'd feel that a package in Suggests that is not available on the RStudio Server shouldn't cause an error & fail to deploy a Shiny application.

2

Interesting! Did you library() the package in question or refer to it with mypackage:: somewhere in your code?

An easy way to test this is to use rsconnect::writeManifest() and see if the package shows up in the output manifest.json file. The way that packages get added to this is via:

  • explicit library() or require() references
  • package references like mypackage::
  • reverse dependencies

As a "Suggests" package, you are right that reverse dependencies should not be picking it up, so I am curious whether one of the other two might be in play!