When working with different computers at home or work, one of the problems I have is installing missing packages in R. As an example, a script that works in my work computer may not work in my home computer if I’m using a new package. This is specially annoying when I have a fresh install of the operating system. In this case I must manualy install all packages, case by case.
One of the solutions to this problem is to use package pacman. It includes function p_load that will check if a package is available and, if not, install it from CRAN. However, for me, I like using library and require as it is consistent with my code format. Also, in a fresh R install, I rather install all my required packages in a single run.
Package PkgsFromFiles solves this issue by finding and parsing all R related files (.R, .Rmd, .Rnw) from a given folder, finding all calls to library() and require() and installing all unavailable packages.
# from cran
install.packages('PkgsFromFiles')
# from github
if (!require(devtools)) install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github('msperlin/PkgsFromFiles')The main function of the package is pff_find_and_install_pkgs, which will search and install missing packages from R files at a given directory. As an example, we’ll use the folder from the package, which contains two example scripts. Let’s try it out:
# Evaluation is disable so it passes CRAN CHECKS, but you should be able to run it in your computer
library(PkgsFromFiles)
# make sure
my.dir <- dirname(system.file('extdata', package = 'PkgsFromFiles'))
df <- pff_find_and_install_pkgs(folder.in = my.dir)As you can see, function pff_find_and_install_pkgs will find all R related files recursivelly in the given folder. A summary in text is shown at the end of execution.
The output of the function is a dataframe with the details of the operation:
dplyr::glimpse(df)The package also includes function pff_plot_summary_pkgs
p <- pff_plot_summary_pkgs(folder.in = my.dir)
print(p)