Package dependencies when installing from source in R

Question

Just confirming: If I distribute my R package as ZIP/TAR then installing the package will not automatically download/install dependencies because I have to set repos = NULL in install.packages() and dependencies parameter is not used if repos = NULL? The way to possibly get this to work is to package an install script. Is that possible? Am I completely missing something here and there is a mechanism to install from source AND automagically download and install dependencies?

Answer 1

You could make your own repository and set repos to be a vector of the places to look for packages, where it would start with your own repository and then include a link to a CRAN mirror. This is what I do and it works quite nicely, as then I can easily share my packages with others and update them from whatever computer I happen to be on.

Answer 2

The devtools package has a function install. If used on a directory containing the source code for an R package, it will install that package and download any dependencies from CRAN.

Answer 3

You can use

  devtools::install_local(path)

It can automatically download all the dependencies.

Answer 4

If you have a Github account myname, push your R package to a repo mypackage. Then just call devtools::install_github("myname/mypackage"). Package mypackage will be downloaded and installed as will all the dependencies listed under Imports in the DESCRIPTION file.