Background
While setting up the criticalissues devcontainer for an Oxfordshire road safety pipeline, we hit several missing system dependencies and slow install patterns. The fixes are small but meaningfully improve the out-of-the-box experience for anyone doing spatial / road-network R work in this container.
Proposed additions to postCreate.sh (or equivalent)
1. System packages
apt-get install -y libglpk-dev libglpk40 xz-utils
libglpk is required by CRAN packages such as igraph and glmmTMB. Without it, those packages either fail to install or produce a runtime error. xz-utils is needed for decompressing certain OS data archives.
2. tippecanoe (vector tile generation)
if ! command -v tippecanoe &> /dev/null; then
git clone https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe.git
cd tippecanoe && make -j && make install && cd ..
rm -rf tippecanoe
fi
tippecanoe is the standard tool for building PMTiles / MBTiles from GeoJSON. It is not in apt and must be built from source. Adding it here avoids every project having to document this step.
3. Posit Package Manager (PPM) binary R installs
options(repos = c(PPM = "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/__linux__/bookworm/latest"))
Setting this as the default repo for Bookworm containers turns 20–30 minute source builds of packages like sf, duckdb, brms into ~2-minute binary installs. This is the single highest-leverage change for dev container startup time.
Reference implementation
A working postCreate.sh using all three improvements can be found in:
https://github.com/Robinlovelace/criticalissues/blob/ox-generalisable/.devcontainer/postCreate.sh
Happy to submit a PR if the approach fits the repo's structure.
Background
While setting up the criticalissues devcontainer for an Oxfordshire road safety pipeline, we hit several missing system dependencies and slow install patterns. The fixes are small but meaningfully improve the out-of-the-box experience for anyone doing spatial / road-network R work in this container.
Proposed additions to
postCreate.sh(or equivalent)1. System packages
libglpkis required by CRAN packages such asigraphandglmmTMB. Without it, those packages either fail to install or produce a runtime error.xz-utilsis needed for decompressing certain OS data archives.2. tippecanoe (vector tile generation)
tippecanoe is the standard tool for building PMTiles / MBTiles from GeoJSON. It is not in apt and must be built from source. Adding it here avoids every project having to document this step.
3. Posit Package Manager (PPM) binary R installs
Setting this as the default repo for Bookworm containers turns 20–30 minute source builds of packages like
sf,duckdb,brmsinto ~2-minute binary installs. This is the single highest-leverage change for dev container startup time.Reference implementation
A working
postCreate.shusing all three improvements can be found in:https://github.com/Robinlovelace/criticalissues/blob/ox-generalisable/.devcontainer/postCreate.sh
Happy to submit a PR if the approach fits the repo's structure.