Uvr: A uv-Style Package Manager for R, Written in Rust

Uvr is a new open-source R package and project manager written in Rust, modeled on Python's uv. It combines a declarative uvr.toml manifest, a reproducible uvr.lock lockfile, per-project isolated libraries, and built-in R version management into a single static binary — no sudo, no separate R or Python runtime required.

The tool installs packages from pre-built P3M binaries by default, falling back to CRAN source only when necessary, and supports CRAN, Bioconductor, and GitHub sources. Benchmarks shared by the author show sync times of roughly 0.2-0.3 seconds for common package sets like jsonlite, ggplot2, and tidyverse, versus several seconds for renv, install.packages, or pak on the same machine.

For R developers currently stitching together renv, rig, and pak to cover reproducibility, R-version management, and fast installs separately, uvr aims to unify these workflows the way uv did for Python packaging — with CI-native commands like sync --frozen and cross-platform binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows.