update.packages {utils}R Documentation

Download Packages from CRAN

Description

These functions can be used to automatically compare the version numbers of installed packages with the newest available version on CRAN and update outdated packages on the fly.

Usage

update.packages(lib.loc = NULL, CRAN = getOption("CRAN"),
                contriburl = contrib.url(CRAN),
                method, instlib = NULL,
                ask=TRUE, available=NULL, destdir=NULL,
                installWithVers=FALSE)

installed.packages(lib.loc = NULL, priority = NULL)
CRAN.packages(CRAN = getOption("CRAN"), method,
              contriburl = contrib.url(CRAN))
old.packages(lib.loc = NULL, CRAN = getOption("CRAN"),
             contriburl = contrib.url(CRAN),
             method, available = NULL)

download.packages(pkgs, destdir, available = NULL,
                  CRAN = getOption("CRAN"),
                  contriburl = contrib.url(CRAN), method)
install.packages(pkgs, lib, CRAN = getOption("CRAN"),
                 contriburl = contrib.url(CRAN),
                 method, available = NULL, destdir = NULL,
                 installWithVers = FALSE)

Arguments

lib.loc character vector describing the location of R library trees to search through (and update packages therein).
CRAN character, the base URL of the CRAN mirror to use, i.e., the URL of a CRAN root such as "http://cran.r-project.org" (the default) or its Statlib mirror, "http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN".
contriburl URL of the contrib section of CRAN. Use this argument only if your CRAN mirror is incomplete, e.g., because you burned only the contrib section on a CD. Overrides argument CRAN.
method Download method, see download.file.
pkgs character vector of the short names of packages whose current versions should be downloaded from CRAN.
destdir directory where downloaded packages are stored.
priority character vector or NULL (default). If non-null, used to select packages; "high" is equivalent to c("base","recommended"). To select all packages without an assigned priority, use priority = "NA".
available list of packages available at CRAN as returned by CRAN.packages.
lib,instlib character string giving the library directory where to install the packages.
ask logical indicating to ask before packages are actually downloaded and installed.
installWithVers If TRUE, will invoke the install the package such that it can be referenced by package version

Details

installed.packages scans the ‘DESCRIPTION’ files of each package found along lib.loc and returns a list of package names, library paths and version numbers. CRAN.packages returns a similar list, but corresponding to packages currently available in the contrib section of CRAN, the comprehensive R archive network. The current list of packages is downloaded over the internet (or copied from a local CRAN mirror). Both functions use read.dcf for parsing the description files. old.packages compares the two lists and reports installed packages that have newer versions on CRAN.

download.packages takes a list of package names and a destination directory, downloads the newest versions of the package sources and saves them in destdir. If the list of available packages is not given as argument, it is also directly obtained from CRAN. If CRAN is local, i.e., the URL starts with "file:", then the packages are not downloaded but used directly.

The main function of the bundle is update.packages. First a list of all packages found in lib.loc is created and compared with the packages available on CRAN. Outdated packages are reported and for each outdated package the user can specify if it should be automatically updated. If so, the package sources are downloaded from CRAN and installed in the respective library path (or instlib if specified) using the R INSTALL mechanism.

install.packages can be used to install new packages, it takes a vector of package names and a destination library, downloads the packages from CRAN and installs them. If the library is omitted it defaults to the first directory in .libPaths(), with a warning if there is more than one.

For install.packages and update.packages, destdir is the directory to which packages will be downloaded. If it is NULL (the default) a temporary directory is used, and the user will be given the option of deleting the temporary files once the packages are installed. (They will always be deleted at the end of the R session.)

See Also

See download.file for how to handle proxies and other options to monitor file transfers.

INSTALL, REMOVE, library, .packages, read.dcf

Examples

str(ip <- installed.packages(priority = "high"))
ip[, c(1,3:5)]
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