install.packages {utils}R Documentation

Install Packages from CRAN-like Repositories

Description

Download and install packages from CRAN-like repositories or from local files.

Usage

install.packages(pkgs, lib, repos = getOption("repos"),
                 contriburl = contrib.url(repos, type),
                 method, available = NULL, destdir = NULL,
                 dependencies = NA, type = getOption("pkgType"),
                 configure.args = getOption("configure.args"),
                 configure.vars = getOption("configure.vars"),
                 clean = FALSE, Ncpus = getOption("Ncpus"), ...)

Arguments

pkgs character vector of the short names of packages whose current versions should be downloaded from the repositories.

If repos = NULL, a character vector of file paths of ‘.tar.gz’ files. These can be source archives or binary package archive files (as created by R CMD build --binary). Tilde-expansion will be done on the file paths.

If this is a zero-length character vector, a listbox of available packages is presented where possible.

lib character vector giving the library directories where to install the packages. Recycled as needed. If missing, defaults to the first element of .libPaths().
repos character vector, the base URL(s) of the repositories to use, i.e., the URL of the CRAN master such as "http://cran.r-project.org" or its Statlib mirror, "http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN".

Can be NULL to install from local files (with extension ‘.tar.gz’ for source packages).

contriburl URL(s) of the contrib sections of the repositories. Use this argument only if your repository mirror is incomplete, e.g., because you burned only the ‘contrib’ section on a CD. Overrides argument repos. As with repos, can also be NULL to install from local files.
method download method, see download.file.
available an object as returned by available.packages listing packages available at the repositories, or NULL which makes an internal call to available.packages.
destdir directory where downloaded packages are stored. If it is NULL (the default) a directory downloaded_packages of the session temporary directory will be used (and the files will be deleted at the end of the session).
dependencies logical indicating to also install uninstalled packages on which these packages depend/suggest/import (and so on recursively). Not used if repos = NULL. Can also be a character vector, a subset of c("Depends", "Imports", "LinkingTo", "Suggests", "Enhances").

Only supported if lib is of length one (or missing), so it is unambiguous where to install the dependent packages.

The default, NA, means c("Depends", "Imports", "LinkingTo") if lib is unambiguous, and FALSE otherwise.

type character, indicating the type of package to download and install.

Possible values are "source", "mac.binary", "mac.binary.leopard", "win.binary" and "win64.binary": the binary types can be listed and downloaded but not installed on other platforms.

The default is the appropriate binary type on 32-bit Windows and on the CRAN binary Mac OS X distribution, otherwise "source".

configure.args (not used on Windows) a character vector or a named list. If a character vector with no names is supplied, the elements are concatenated into a single string (separated by a space) and used as the value for the --configure-args flag in the call to R CMD INSTALL. If the character vector has names these are assumed to identify values for --configure-args for individual packages. This allows one to specify settings for an entire collection of packages which will be used if any of those packages are to be installed. (These settings can therefore be re-used and act as default settings.)

A named list can be used also to the same effect, and that allows multi-element character strings for each package which are concatenated to a single string to be used as the value for --configure-args.

configure.vars (not used on Windows) analogous, for --configure-vars which is used to set environment variables for the configure run.
clean a logical value indicating whether to specify to add the --clean flag to the call to R CMD INSTALL. This is sometimes used to perform additional operations at the end of the package installation in addition to removing intermediate files.
Ncpus The number of parallel processes to use for a parallel install of source packages. Values greater than one are supported only if GNU make is in use (more precisely, if make -j Ncpus works). Defaults to 1 if the option is unset.
... Arguments to be passed to download.file.

Details

R packages are primarily distributed as source packages, but binary packages (a packaging up of the installed package) are also available, and the type most commonly used by Windows and users of the Mac OS X GUI R.app. install.packages can install either type, either by downloading a file from a repository or from a local file. The default type is given by getOption("pkgType"): this "source" apart from under Windows or a CRAN binary distribution for Mac OS X.

install.packages is used to install packages. It takes a vector of names and a destination library, downloads the packages from the repositories and installs them. (If the library is omitted it defaults to the first directory in .libPaths(), with a warning if there is more than one.) If lib is omitted or is of length one and is not a (group) writable directory, the code offers to create a personal library tree (the first element of Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER")) and install there.

For source packages from a repository is used an attempt is made to install the packages in an order that respects their dependencies. This does assume that all the entries in lib are on the default library path for installs (set by R_LIBS).

You are advised to run update.packages before install.packages to ensure that any already installed dependencies have their latest versions.

Value

Invisible NULL.

Note

Some binary distributions of R have INSTALL in a separate bundle, e.g. an R-devel RPM. install.packages will give an error if called with type = "source" on such a system.

Some binary distributions can be installed on a machine without the tools needed to install packages: the remedy is to do a complete install of R which should bring in all those tools as dependencies.

See Also

update.packages, available.packages, download.packages, installed.packages, contrib.url.

See download.file for how to handle proxies and other options to monitor file transfers.

INSTALL, REMOVE, remove.packages, library, .packages, read.dcf

The ‘R Installation and Administration’ manual for how to set up a repository.

Examples


## Not run: 
install.packages(
    c("XML_0.99-5.tar.gz",
      "../../Interfaces/Perl/RSPerl_0.8-0.tar.gz"),
    repos = NULL,
    configure.args = c(XML = '--with-xml-config=xml-config',
                       RSPerl = "--with-modules='IO Fcntl'"))

## End(Not run)

[Package utils version 2.11.0 Index]