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I have an R Notebook that I am building to provide an analysis for somebody, and I am wondering if I should choose another option as I don't know if she will be able to run the Notebook without having R installed.

Is it possible to run an R Notebook as a single entity or must you have R installed in order to do it?

Mus
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  • What do you mean by run? To run any of the code chunks individually or re-knit the document obviously she needs some sort of R distribution. But knitted documents (.html, .pdf, etc.) are self-contained because all the chunks have already been run and rendered. – Joe Roe Feb 24 '21 at 10:25

2 Answers2

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Notebook will need R to run. To distribute a notebook without the R dependency will be a bit more elaborate, like installing rstudio server within a docker container. User will, in this particular case, need to have Docker installed and know how to start a container. From there on the user can interact with the code through a web browser.

Another option would be to use the cloud solution that some companies offer. It offers sharing functionality and you don't have to worry about the infrastructure or distribution of your work. There are some free plans that may work for you, but the real power is in premium features.

Roman Luštrik
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To rerun the notebook they require R. But the whole point of R Notebooks is that they produce a static document as output. That document (usually in HTML format) can be shared in isolation, and does not require any additional software besides a web browser to be viewerd.

Konrad Rudolph
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  • Of course, this is more like what I mean. The idea is that I will run the Notebook on my machine locally then send the output HTML to the user with the knowledge that they can see it for themselves without needing to run anything further. Thanks for clarifying. – Mus Feb 24 '21 at 10:27