Install Packages — install • renv

Install one or more R packages from a variety of remote sources.

install(
  packages = NULL,
  ...,
  library = NULL,
  type = NULL,
  rebuild = FALSE,
  prompt = interactive(),
  project = NULL
)

Arguments

packages	A character vector of R packages to install. Required package dependencies (`Depends`, `Imports`, `LinkingTo`) will be installed as required.
...	Unused arguments, reserved for future expansion. If any arguments are matched to `...`, `renv` will signal an error.
library	The R library to be used. When `NULL`, the active project library will be used instead.
type	The type of package to install ("source" or "binary"). Defaults to the value of `getOption("pkgType")`.
rebuild	Force packages to be rebuilt, thereby bypassing any installed versions of the package available in the cache? This can either be a boolean (indicating that the requested package(s) should be rebuilt), or a vector of package names indicating which packages should be rebuilt.
prompt	Boolean; prompt the user before taking any action? For backwards compatibility, `confirm` is accepted as an alias for `prompt`.
project	The project directory. If `NULL`, then the active project will be used. If no project is currently active, then the current working directory is used instead.

Value

A named list of package records which were installed by renv.

Details

install() uses the same machinery as restore() when installing packages. In particular, this means that the local cache of package installations is used when possible. This helps to avoid re-downloading packages that have already been downloaded before, and re-compiling packages from source when a binary copy of that package is already available.

Note that this interface is subject to change -- the goal is to hook into separate package installation backends in the future.

Package Configuration

Many R packages have a configure script that needs to be run to prepare the package for installation. Arguments and environment variables can be passed through to those scripts in a manner similar to install.packages. In particular, the R options configure.args and configure.vars can be used to map package names to their appropriate configuration. For example:

# installation of RNetCDF may require us to set include paths for netcdf
configure.args = c(RNetCDF = "--with-netcdf-include=/usr/include/udunits2"))
options(configure.args = configure.args)
renv::install("RNetCDF")

Examples

if (FALSE) {

# install the latest version of 'digest'
renv::install("digest")

# install an old version of 'digest' (using archives)
renv::install("digest@0.6.18")

# install 'digest' from GitHub (latest dev. version)
renv::install("eddelbuettel/digest")

# install a package from local sources
renv::install("~/path/to/package")

}