New version of the OpenSAFELY R image

We are pleased to announce the availability of a new version of the R image, which we call r:v2. This includes R 4.4.3, and an updated suite of libraries. This has been in a beta testing period for a while, but is now generally available.

Upgrading

To upgrade, you should just be able to change the relevant run: commands for your actions in your project.yaml file to use r:v2 rather than r:latest. Our testing indicates that most existing R code should work with the v2 image unchanged, however, there may be some breaking changes, and you may need to fix your code to work with the newer version or R or some of the libraries

The old version of the R image is still available under r:v1, so you do not need to change to v2 if you do not want to (for example, if your project is nearly completed). However, we do recommend that ongoing projects switch to using the r:v2 action image, and the documentation and tooling has been changed to default to the v2 image for new projects.

You can read more details and information about the whys and hows behind the new image on our blog post OpenSAFELY, but new-R

As always, any further questions, or any problems with the v2 image, and you can reach out to tech-support.