The purpose of this package is to provide a simple utility to just install R packages, without loading it. This is especially useful when using with packages like {box}, which can be use to only load specify functions rather than a full package.
This package is a wrapper for the install_ family of functions in the {remotes} package.
There are many tools to load install and load packages, which this tool does not try to replace. This package is comprised of just one function (justinstall()), which only does the following:
Checks if the package is installed. If it is installed, it won’t load it nor attempt to reinstall (unlike require()).
If the package is not there, it will install it from the specified source.
The second motivation behind this package is too address the a common requirement in R training/university assignment, where it is asked to provide a “self-contained” script or notebook that install all required libraries. Having a function that does check before installing can make testing faster by allowing to run code from start to end without reinstalling packages over and over (Note:this does not pretend to be a replacement to {renv}).
To determine what to install, create a data frame or a tibble, containing the package name, the source repoistory and the url/github adress or the repository in question. For instance, using tibble::tribble():
packages_to_install <- tibble::tribble(~package, ~source,~url,
"librarian", "github","DesiQuintans/librarian",
"box", "cran","",
"randomForest", "cran","", # for RandomForest
"here", "cran","",
"fs", "cran","",
"aussiemaps", "r-universe","https://carlosyanez.r-universe.dev"
)Then, just pass the data frame/tibble as input into the function:
Finally, load the packages or functions using your preferred method.
As mentioned before, this package leverages the install_ family from the remotes package. The sources and url formats matches each of those functions, i.e.:
| Source | URL |
|---|---|
| cran | (empty,uses system settings) |
| bioc | package name, for more options, look at ?install_bioc |
| bitbucket | user/repository |
| dev | (empty) |
| git | url/file.git |
| gitlab | user/repository |
| github | user/repository |
| local | folder |
| svn | url |
| url | url |
| r-universe | url |
For more details, you can check the documentation for each install_ function.