Can't get R-based Conda environment to deploy

[mertcelebi]

Hi there,

I am trying to binderize a GitHub repo. It includes a Jupyter notebook that uses R (and R libraries under the hood).

I am following the R language instructions for MyBinder (https://mybinder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howto/languages.html#the-r-language), as I couldn't find the congruent instructions for Pangeo. But they don’t see to work for new versions of R (I have tried with R v4.1 and v4.2). When I try to launch the instance, I get the error Error during build: Version ‘4.1’ of R is not supported.

Following this, I tried to switch to using Conda for the installation (see this branch). Now it's failing with another error: Problem: package r-irkernel-1.1-r35h6115d3f_0 requires r-base >=3.5,<3.6.0a0, but none of the providers can be installed. This error is from a Conda environment with the bare minimum as a test:

name: stats
channels:
  - conda-forge
  - bioconda
  - defaults
dependencies:
  - python=3.9
  - numpy=1.23.5
  - r-base=4.2.2

I’ve read through Pangeo’s docs site, but have not been able to figure out a solution. Do you have any recommendations/suggestions? I could use a Dockerfile based approach, but that seems overkill :/