isabella232 / pkginstall

Provides a replacement for `utils::install.packages()`

pkginstall

Provides a replacement for utils::install.packages(repo = NULL). I.e. it builds binary packages from source packages, and extracts the compressed archives into the package library.

Compared to utils::install.packages() it

• Has robust support for installing packages in parallel.
• Fails immediately when the first package fails when installing multiple packages, rather than returning a warning.
• Uses the same code paths on all platforms, rather than similar (but not identical) code paths.
• Succeeds or fails atomically. Either the complete package is installed or it fails with an informative error message.
• Has additional tests for package validity before installing
• Always uses per-package lock files, to protect against simultaneous installation
• Has a robust set of tests, to ensure correctness and ease debugging installation issues.

Installation

Once on CRAN, install with

install.packages("pkginstall")

Example

files <- download.packages("remotes", type = "binary", ".")
pkginstall::install_binary(files[[2]])

Status

pkginstall is superseded: the functionality was included directly in the pkgdepends package, used by pak. We recommend using pak instead.