pkg

Manage Package Libraries

pkg installs R packages from various sources.

Installation

Install the package from CRAN:

install.packages("pkg")
pkg::pkg_create_private_lib()

The second line creates pkg's own package library, to avoid interference between pkg's dependencies and the user's regular packages. Run this command any time to update pkg's package library.

Usage

Simply call pkg_install to install packages:

pkg::pkg_install("dplyr", lib = "/tmp/lib")

All dependencies will be installed as well, to the same library.

Goals

• Make package installation cheaper and more reliable.

• Cheaper, reliable package installation allows safer, more convenient workflows.

Features

Speedy Features

• Fast downloads and queries (all HTTP is concurrent).

• Fast installs (package installations and builds are concurrent).

• Package cache (all downloaded and locally built packages are cached).

• Lazy downloads, only download metadata and package files if needed.

Safety features

• Private library (pkg's own dependencies do not affect your "regular" packages and vice versa).

• Do not load any package in the main process (except for pkg itself). Every operation runs in the sub-process, and the packages are loaded from the private library.

• Dependency solver: makes sure that you end up in a consistent, working state of dependencies. Find conflicts up front, before actually installing anything.

• Confirmation, warning for overwriting loaded packages.

• Concurrency safe, locks library, locks caches. Lock is released when the process terminates.

Convenience features

• GitHub packages.

• BioC packages.

• Show download sizes.

License

GPL-3 © RStudio