A Fresh Approach to R Package Installation
pak installs R packages from CRAN, Bioconductor, GitHub, URLs, local files and directories. It is an alternative to install.packages()
and devtools::install_github()
. pak is fast, safe and convenient.
Install a binary build of pak from our repository on GitHub:
install.packages("pak", repos = sprintf("https://r-lib.github.io/p/pak/stable/%s/%s/%s", .Platform$pkgType, R.Version()$os, R.Version()$arch))
This is supported for the following systems:
OS | CPU | R version |
---|---|---|
Linux | x86_64 | R 3.4.0 - R-devel |
Linux | aarch64 | R 3.4.0 - R-devel |
macOS High Sierra+ | x86_64 | R 3.4.0 - R-devel |
macOS Big Sur+ | aarch64 | R 4.1.0 - R-devel |
Windows | x86_64 | R 3.4.0 - R-devel |
For macOS we only support the official CRAN R build. Other builds, e.g. Homebrew R, are not supported.
Install the released version of the package from CRAN as usual:
install.packages("pak")
This potentially needs a C compiler on platforms CRAN does not have binaries packages for.
We have nightly binary builds, for the same systems as the table above:
install.packages("pak", repos = sprintf("https://r-lib.github.io/p/pak/devel/%s/%s/%s", .Platform$pkgType, R.Version()$os, R.Version()$arch))
Call pkg_install()
to install CRAN or Bioconductor packages:
pak::pkg_install("usethis")
To install packages from GitHub, use the user/repo
syntax:
pak::pkg_install("r-lib/usethis")
All dependencies will be installed as well, to the same library.
The setup-r-dependencies
action at r-lib/actions
uses pak to install packages. See the examples
directory for example workflows.
Fast downloads and HTTP queries. pak performs all HTTP requests concurrently.
Fast installs. pak builds and installs packages concurrently.
Metadata and package cache. pak caches package metadata and all downloaded packages locally. It does not download the same package files over and over again.
Lazy installation. pak only installs the packages that are really necessary for the installation. If the requested package and its dependencies are already installed, pak does nothing.
Private library (pak’s own package dependencies do not affect your regular package libraries and vice versa).
Every pak operation runs in a sub-process, and the packages are loaded from the private library. pak avoids loading packages from your regular package libraries. (These package files would be locked on some systems, and locked packages cannot be updated. pak does not load any package in the main process, except for pak itself).
To avoid updating locked packages, pak offers the choice of unloading them from the current R session, and/or killing other R sessions locking them.
Dependency solver. pak makes sure that you end up in a consistent, working state of dependencies. It finds conflicts up front, before attempting installation.
System package support. pak automatically installs system dependencies on several Linux distributions.
BioC packages. pak supports Bioconductor packages out of the box. It uses the Bioconductor version that is appropriate for your R version.
GitHub packages. pak supports GitHub packages out of the box. It also supports the Remotes
entry in DESCRIPTION
files, so that GitHub dependencies of GitHub packages will also get installed. See e.g. https://cran.r-project.org/package=remotes/vignettes/dependencies.html
Easy time travel with MRAN and RSPM, to a specific date or when a certain R or package version was released.
Package sizes. For CRAN packages pak shows the total sizes of packages it needs to download.
Other package sources: