My system installation of R is controlled by administrators, who make changes upon request from multiple users without coordination. This causes problems for me because some packages installed in my user library interact badly with upgraded packages in the system library. This breaks cron jobs and I have to spend time maintaining it.
When running install.packages or an equivalent, is there a way to make R ignore system-installed packages, and install all transitive dependencies in my user library? For example, I tried running R_LIBS=/path/to/lib R but the system install is still on .libPaths(), and dependencies of my package are still not installed in my user library.
Oh! It looks like renv is just what I want.
Related
In our team, we are sharing self-written functions (e.g. for connecting to our dbs) via a self-written package that I set up in a git-repository (non-public).
As a general rule, we avoid to install packages in our users' accounts. Instead we use renv to get reproducible environments. How can I best handle the private package with renv?
Can I somehow use renv::install() to install the package from the private git-repo with ssh-keys?
What I've done so far: I cloned the package and installed it via R CMD INSTALL path/to/folder_with_tar.gz. renv does not seem to pick up the package when running renv::init() / renv::snapshot(). I am working on using devtools to install from repository (currently waiting for IT to resolve git2r issue) but this would not solve the problem with renv.
Sorry for no MWE, I don't know how to produce one in this case.
EDIT 2022-11-08:
I want to keep this question open because this is not an answer to the question but rather a workaround. However, if using RStudio with a professional license, the best solution is to use the Package Manager. This circumvents the problem a bit: Instead of dealing with how to acces the private git from renv, the Package Manager manages the access.
So the thing is my IT department is scared of R and therefore only allows us to use it on a laptop that can't go online. Therefore they are the ones to install packages on it.
But due to covid I'm at home discovering they didn't install the requested packages. So I'm looking to see if there is a way to download these packages on a laptop with internet access, add them to an USB and then install them from the USB in R?
Quite easy, just download the package from the CRAN site e.g. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/imputeTS/
You can either download the "Package source" or the "Binaries" (must be your operating system.
If you are using R Studio, there is then even a menu item for installing the package - just select the file you downloaded and here you go.
If you are not using R Studio, just provide the path to your downloaded archive in the install.packages command.
The only problem is, you also need all the dependencies ...;)
So you ideally already have them and just one package is somehow missing - otherwise this can get quite time consuming to download all the dependencies - because the dependencies itself also usually have dependencies themselves...
In this case the miniCRAN solution Roland linked in the comments might be an idea. ( Offline installation of a list of packages: getting dependencies in order ) But didn't try the miniCRAN myself yet - would be interested how good this actually works.
Apologies if this has been answered before but I can't find any related answer.
Is there an option to force install packages in R and their dependencies in a user library even if they exists on a common/system library?
For example, package "viridis" requires "viridisLite", however if the later is installed on the system library it will not be automatically installed on the user library when installing "viridis". This can cause some errors.
I´m developing an R package in RStudio and a set a local library to contain all my packages. After installing some updates in my Ubuntu system, it seems that my R Project have lost track of the local library and is unable to load the libraries that were associated with it. If I try to Build & Reload the package with
R CMD INSTALL --no-multiarch --with-keep.source mypackage
The program tries to install to library '/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/' which is rejected with:
ERROR: No permission to install to directory '/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/'
As far as I remember, whenever I rebuilt my package, that line pointed to my local directory, where all my libraries were localted
installing to library ‘/home/user/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2’
It is clear that somehow R have lost track of the connection between the project and the libraries.
I tried re-including the path with
.LibPaths("/home/user/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2")
but, just after I rebuild the package again, the program created a 3.3 directory in x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library. From there, it is unable to find the libraries that are associated to my program and throws another error:
ERROR: dependencies '...', '...' are not available for package "mypackage"
Is there a way to restore the program to the way it was before so I don't have to reinstall everything and start from scratch?
By default, R adds the major-minor version numbers to the library path (?.libPaths) for a good reason, assuming that the jump from 3.2 to 3.3 introduced efficiencies or incompatibilities. It is implied that this version jump requires new installation of packages.
If you override this, packages assembled in 3.2 may not always play nicely in 3.3. (I'm not going to test this theory, please report back if you can disprove this statement, I'm honestly interested!)
BTW: your call to .libPaths seems suspect: I don't know of a capital-L version, and when calling it you should include the previous path (unless you truly mean to omit the system R library paths entirely), such as:
.libPaths("/home/user/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2", .libPaths())
If you choose to do that, any bugs you may find in others' packages are possibly due to that incompatibility and should not necessarily be reported to developers.
Another option would be to re-install all packages from your 3.2 installation into your 3.3 library path. Something like this should help automate the process:
# to reinstall packages installed in R-3.2 subdir into R-3.3
install.packages(list.files(path = "~/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2"))
My Fedora system (Fedora 20, all up to date) has just had R updated to version 3.1.0. Since then, I've had issues installing multiple packages. glmnet failed previously, and now I'm having trouble with treemap. More specifically, I get an error during treemap installation that httpuv has zero exit status.
I never had issues with the previous version of R. Any reason this version should have such problems??
There could be many causes to do with your OS, version, permissions, other installed packages/software, etc, etc. Without seeing the full error message it's hard to know.
One possibility specific to httpuv is root privileges. I've noticed a few threads on various forums when searching for installation errors with this package and Linux, many of them mentioning root v. non-root issues. In another case, libuv needed to be upgraded.
I encounter package installation problems daily and I have some more general work-arounds as well. Hopefully one of these will solve your problem.
Install the package from source
download.file(url="http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/httpuv_1.3.0.tar.gz", destfile = "httpuv.tar.gz")
install.packages("httpuv.tar.gz", type = "source", repos = NULL)
Install using devtools via GitHub if the package supports it
Install RTools and re-try your package installation
Install an older version of the package
If those above do not work, then I dig deeper by referring to advice given to me by a VP of IT in my company. These comments were made in reference to frequent package installation problems I encountered when switching from Windows to Solaris:
There are two types of install/make problems. Missing .h files
and/or missing .so/.a libs. The reason for these are multiple:
1.- the package that delivers these is not installed. This means that those files cannot be found anywhere in the /usr tree. Solution is
install right package, make sure the files are there
2.- the includes are not found by the install configurator. This means some environment variable or install option is not properly set (this
is our case for RODBC). Figuring out which variable to set is
challenging without looking at the package documentation [fortunately, documentation is not hard to find!]
3.- the libs are not in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, easy to fix.
4.- There is a deeper compile/link error, meaning the package is not compatible with the rest of the sw, or has not been properly ported.