In R, I have developed my own package for work (let's call it 'foo') and I have built the package and produced a binary foo.zip with the dependencies (e.g. ggplot2) listed in the description file.
When I use the R package installer in the packages tab it doesn't automatically download the dependencies from CRAN. Ultimately I don't want the end user to have to do this and I don't intend to load it to CRAN for the time being.
I have a way with: devtools::install_dep but I don't want the user to have to do this!
Use the remotes package:
remotes::install_deps("~/RStudio/foo/foo.tar.gz")
You don't say how you're expecting users to install the package. I believe if you put it on the web on a CRAN-like repository, and tell your users to install from there, R will by default install dependencies. This involves telling them how to add your repository to the repository list, so it might be just as easy to ask them to install devtools and use devtools::install_dep.
Another possibility is to distribute your package in a source version; then this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/38902163/2554330 gives ideas how to proceed. One that works for me to install something like "~/RStudio/foo/foo.tar.gz" is
install_url(paste0("file://", normalizePath("~/RStudio/foo/foo.tar.gz")))
If you are on Windows, you'll probably need a slightly different way to construct the URL.
Distributing binary packages is only convenient if all your users use the same version of R as you do; they aren't guaranteed to work if the minor version number changes.
Related
I want to use the R package BOLTSSIRR available on GitHub in my R package, which I want to upload to CRAN.
I listed BOLTSSIRR under Suggests: in the DESCRIPTION file and made the link to GitHub available using Additional_repositories: https://github.com/daviddaigithub/BOLTSSIRR.
However, running R CMD check --as-cran I get:
Suggests or Enhances not in mainstream repositories:
BOLTSSIRR
Availability using Additional_repositories specification:
BOLTSSIRR no ?
? ? https://github.com/daviddaigithub/BOLTSSIRR
Additional repositories with no packages:
https://github.com/daviddaigithub/BOLTSSIRR
So the GitHub link does not seem to get recognized in the check. Might I have to change something here?
As you found, you can't use Remotes in a CRAN package. What you need to do is to make sure the .tar.gz file for the package you are depending on is available somewhere. Github doesn't do that automatically, because https://github.com/daviddaigithub/BOLTSSIRR isn't set up as a package repository.
The solution is to create your own small repository, and keep copies of non-CRAN packages there. The drat package (available here: https://github.com/eddelbuettel/drat) makes this easy as long as you have a Github account: follow the instructions here: https://github.com/drat-base/drat. In summary:
Fork https://github.com/drat-base/drat into your account, and clone it to your own computer.
Enable Github Pages with the docs/ folder in the main branch.
Install the drat package into R using remotes::install_github("eddelbuettel/drat"). (I assume this version will make it to CRAN eventually; if you use the current CRAN version instructions are slightly more complicated.)
Build the package you want to insert. You need the source version; you might want binaries too, if those are hard for your users to build.
Run options(dratBranch="docs"); drat::insertPackage(...) to insert those files into your repository.
Commit the changes, and push them to Github.
In the package that needs to use this non-CRAN package, add
Additional_repositories: https://yourname.github.io/drat
to the DESCRIPTION.
You will be responsible for updating your repository if BOLTSSIRR is updated. This is good because the updates might break yours: after all, it's still in development mode. It's also bad because your users won't automatically get bug fixes.
That's it, if I haven't missed anything!
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.
I have an R file, but it has packages which are not installed on my R installation. Is there a utility which determines these dependencies from the R file and installs all of them? I don't want to manually install them one by one.
The pacman package offers an efficient way to install / load packages in a single line.
You can refer to this article.
I'm not aware of a way that installs packages completely automatically, as there might be namespace overlap between functions, etc...
I want to install a package that is listed in https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_name.html as available in CRAN, but when I check in R the install packages menu or the available.packages() command, I can't see the package there.
Do I need to do something different to install those packages? Why aren't those packages available?
The packages I'm interested on are WikipediR ( https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/WikipediR/index.html ), WikidataR and WikipediaR.
If it matters, I'm using R 2.15.0 in Windows XP.
See the documentation for ?available.packages...
By default, the return value includes only packages whose version and
OS requirements are met by the running version of R, and only gives
information on the latest versions of packages.
In other words... your R 2.15 is likely too old for the package you are looking to download.
You can try to download the package source manually add the package to the package library usually found somewhere like "win-library/2.15/" but like Cory mentioned it is likely that the older version of R does not support the package build.
The advice given so far is a bit incomplete although I do agree you need to update your R version if you want to use these packages. Looks like they don't need compilation so you might have been able to either install from a local copy or drop R code in, but critically they depend on httr which requires R 3.0.0 or above. They were released only relatively recently, so there will be no Windows binaries from back in 2012. (Your copy of R is from 30-Mar-2012.) Look in the DESCRIPTION file which is presented in a nice web format at the CRAN/package listing:
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/WikidataR/index.html
Imports: httr, jsonlite, WikipediR
Suggests: testthat, knitr, pageviews
# only one version of these two
https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/WikidataR/WikidataR_1.0.0.tar.gz
https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/WikipediaR/WikipediaR_1.0.tar.gz
# pick one of these
https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/WikipediR/
We use R at my university, where all computers run Windows XP or Windows 7 and read/write access to most places on the C drive is disabled. This includes the default directory for downloading and installing R packages, but does not include the Downloads folder, so I've been using this work-around:
install.packages("plyr",lib="C:/Users/g-rde434/Downloads/")
library(plyr,lib.loc="C:/Users/g-rde434/Downloads/")
where g-rde434 is the username and I'm just using plyr as an example. For packages that require a lot of other packages in order to work, this gets messy because I've found that I have to manually install all the depends before I can install the package I actually want to use. For instances, packages like ggplot2 and sirt each require a whole bunch of other packages to work properly. Is there a much easier way to do what I'm trying to do? I'm not asking about clever vectorizing tricks or anything like that, but rather some way to force the "higher-up" packages (e.g., ggplot2 or sirt) to load all the other packages it needs from the library location I specified above?
Please try:
install.packages("plyr", lib="C:/Users/g-rde434/Downloads/", dependencies=TRUE)
For further reference see:
How to tell CRAN to install package dependencies automatically?