Technology Tales

How to persist R packages across remote Windows server sessions

Published on 9^th January 2026 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Recently, I was using R to automate some code changes that needed implementation when porting code from a vendor to client systems. While I was doing so, I noticed that packages needed to be reinstalled every time that I logged into their system. This was because they were going into a temporary area by default. The solution was to define another location where the packages could be persisted.

That meant creating a .Renviron file, with Windows Explorer making that manoeuvre an awkward one that could not be completed. Using PowerShell was the solution for this. There, I could use the following command to do what I needed:

New-Item -ItemType File "$env:USERPROFILE\Documents\.Renviron" -Force

That gave me an empty .Renviron file, to which I could add the following text for where the packages should be kept (the path may differ on your system):

R_LIBS_USER=C:/R/packages

Here, the paths are only examples and do not always represent what the real ones were, and that is by design for reasons of client confidentiality. Restarting RStudio to give me a fresh R session meant that I now could install packages using commands like this one:

install.packages("tidyverse")

Version constraints meant for compilation from source in my case, making for a long wait time for completion. Once that was done, though, there was no need for a repeat operation.

One final remark is that file creation and population could be done in the same command in PowerShell:

'R_LIBS_USER=C:/R/packages' | Out-File -Encoding ascii "$env:USERPROFILE\Documents\.Renviron"

It places the text into a new file or completely overwrites an existing, meaning that you really want to do this once should you decide to add any more setting details to .Renviron later on.