CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rmacos
Bill Raynor
Bill Raynor

Reputation: 433

R alternative to install.packages() function

Is there any documentation on manually installing a package in a user library when the R.home() path is locked down and incomplete (no etc, no bin, just library?) The system does NOT support shelling out to execute R CMD, which I believe standard R does.

I would like to build existing source packages (from CRAN) and install into a user library directory, so that I can use the library() function and get all the usual namespace and *.Rdx and *.Rdb files.

At the moment, I'm plodding through install.packages, tools::.build_package, and tools:::.install.packages source, using a standard MacOS R and the r source. Hopefully this has been documented in a more user-friendly fashion and my google searches have missed it.

Thanks.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 648

Answers (1)

merv
merv

Reputation: 76700

You don't need to use a different install.packages method, rather you only need to specify a writable location for storing packages and give it precedence over the system default one. A simple way to accomplish this is to set an R_LIBS environment variable. For instance, in my .bashrc I have

export R_LIBS='/home/username/.local/lib/R-3.3.3'

Then, by default, all packages are installed here. Further, packages installed both here and the system-wide location will give priority to the ones here when loading.

You can verify that the location is being used by checking .libPaths() in your R session.

Upvotes: 1

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