Welcome to rpy-bridge’s documentation!

rpy-bridge is a Python-controlled R execution orchestrator (not a thin rpy2 wrapper). It delivers deterministic, headless-safe R startup, project-root inference, out-of-tree renv activation, isolated script namespaces, and robust Python↔R conversions.

Why it’s different

  • Finds R project roots via markers (.git, .Rproj, renv.lock, DESCRIPTION)

  • Activates renv even when it lives outside the calling directory

  • Executes from the inferred project root so relative paths behave as R expects

  • Runs headless by default (no GUI probing), isolates scripts from globalenv()

  • Normalizes return values for Python (NAs, dtypes, data.frames)

Quickstart

Call a package function (no scripts):

from rpy_bridge import RFunctionCaller

rfc = RFunctionCaller()
samples = rfc.call("stats::rnorm", 5, mean=0, sd=1)
median_val = rfc.call("stats::median", samples)

Call a function from a local script with renv:

from pathlib import Path
from rpy_bridge import RFunctionCaller

project = Path("/path/to/project")
script = project / "scripts" / "example.R"

rfc = RFunctionCaller(path_to_renv=project, scripts=script)
result = rfc.call("some_function", 42, named_arg="value")

Contents

Getting Started

Indices and tables