[R] packaging an R-application

[MacQueen, Don]

This sounds like more of an operating system task than an R task.

But within R, you can come close, I would think, by copying all of the
packages' directories to the same directory as the script. Then write
another script that will install all of the packages. In the future, run
that script before running your script. When you deliver the script,
deliver the whole directory that contains it, since that will then include
the package sources. If you're lucky, all of the packages are source
packages.

Of course, R itself will change over the next three years. Hopefully, none
of the improvements will break your script or the packages it depends on.

There was a long discussion on the topic of "enabling reproducible
research & R package management & install.package.version & BiocLite" in
March of 2013 on R-devel that you might want to look at. And something
similar not too long ago in either R-devel or R-package-devel, if I
remember correctly.

I've never used any of the three options you mention.

-- 
Don MacQueen

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
7000 East Ave., L-627
Livermore, CA 94550
925-423-1062





On 12/23/15, 1:29 PM, "R-help on behalf of Witold E Wolski"
<r-help-bounces at r-project.org on behalf of wewolski at gmail.com> wrote:

>Dear List,
>
>
>What I am seeking advice for is how to best package an R installation
>with all the packages required?
>
>Scenario:
>I need to deliver an R script which will have quite a bit of package
>dependencies, to packages which are not necessarily stable, are not on
>cran and might dissapear in the near future. It should be possible to
>execute the R-script without any changes during the next 3 years.
>
>
>What I did look into is packrat. But if I am correct it pulls the
>r-packages from cran so if a package was from somewhere else or isn't
>available anymore it will fail.
>
>what I have also found is R on an USB stick:
>http://personal.bgsu.edu/~mrizzo/Rmisc/usbR.htm
>
>Would this work?
>
>Or is there anything on the lines of pyinstaller
>(http://www.pyinstaller.org/) for R?
>
>
>Thank you
>
>-- 
>Witold Eryk Wolski
>
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