Installing R Packages from Source

There are times when you use install.packages() and it says something like “the package requested cannot be installed on this version of R.” This typically means something like it is an old pacakge or one that has a lot of dependencies that may be problematic. Here is the first thing to try when you get to those situations.

Published

August 26, 2022

So there are times when you need a package but the normal installation process is not giving you what you want. Either the package is old and hasn’t been updated (and you’ve been keeping up with your working version) or some aspect of the dependency tree is not satisfied.

Here is the first option.

Below is a gist that shows two different ways of getting it. They both require that the package be available as a source file (.tar.gz or .zip) AND that the package is located on CRAN.

Problems: