How should I deal with “package 'xxx' is not available (for R version x.y.z)” warning?

I tried to install a package, using

install.packages("foobarbaz")

but received the warning

Warning message:
package 'foobarbaz' is not available (for R version x.y.z)

Why doesn't R think that the package is available?

See also these questions referring to specific instances of this problem:

Richie Cotton

1. You can't spell

The first thing to test is have you spelled the name of the package correctly? Package names are case sensitive in R.

2. You didn't look in the right repository

Next, you should check to see if the package is available. Type

setRepositories()

See also ?setRepositories.

To see which repositories R will look in for your package, and optionally select some additional ones. At the very least, you will usually want CRAN to be selected, and CRAN (extras) if you use Windows, and the Bioc* repositories if you do any ~~[gen/prote/metabol/transcript]omics~~ biological analyses.

To permanently change this, add a line like setRepositories(ind = c(1:6, 8)) to your Rprofile.site file.

3. The package is not in the repositories you selected

Return all the available packages using

ap <- available.packages()

Since this is a large matrix, you may wish to use the data viewer to examine it. Alternatively, you can quickly check to see if the package is available by testing against the row names.

View(ap)
"foobarbaz" %in% rownames(ap)

Alternatively, the list of available packages can be seen in a browser for CRAN, CRAN (extras), Bioconductor, R-forge, RForge, and github.

Another possible warnings message you may get when interacting with CRAN mirrors is:

Warning: unable to access index for repository

Which may indicate the selected CRAN repository is currently be unavailable. You can select a different mirror with chooseCRANmirror() and try the installation again.

There are several reasons why a package may not be available.

4. You don't want a package

Perhaps you don't really want a package. It is common to be confused about the difference between a package and a library, or a package and a dataset.

A package is a standardized collection of material extending R, e.g. providing code, data, or documentation. A library is a place (directory) where R knows to find packages it can use

To see available datasets, type

data()

5. R or Bioconductor is out of date

It may have a dependency on a more recent version of R (or one of the packages that it imports/depends upon does). Look at

ap["foobarbaz", "Depends"]

and consider updating your R installation to the current version. On Windows, this is most easily done via the installr package.

library(installr)
updateR()

(Of course, you may need to install.packages("installr") first.)

Equivalently for Bioconductor packages, you may need to update your Bioconductor installation.

source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("BiocUpgrade")

6. The package is out of date

It may have been archived (if it is no longer maintained and no longer passes R CMD check tests).

In this case, you can load an old version of the package using install_version()

library(remotes)
install_version("foobarbaz", "0.1.2")

An alternative is to install from the github CRAN mirror.

library(remotes)
install_github("cran/foobarbaz")

7. There is no Windows/OS X/Linux binary

It may not have a Windows binary due to requiring additional software that CRAN does not have. Additionally, some packages are available only via the sources for some or all platforms. In this case, there may be a version in the CRAN (extras) repository (see setRepositories above).

If the package requires compiling code (e.g. C, C++, FORTRAN) then on Windows install Rtools or on OS X install the developer tools accompanying XCode, and install the source version of the package via:

install.packages("foobarbaz", type = "source")

# Or equivalently, for Bioconductor packages:
source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("foobarbaz", type = "source")

On CRAN, you can tell if you'll need special tools to build the package from source by looking at the NeedsCompilation flag in the description.

8. The package is on github/Bitbucket/Gitorious

It may have a repository on Github/Bitbucket/Gitorious. These packages require the remotes package to install.

library(remotes)
install_github("packageauthor/foobarbaz")
install_bitbucket("packageauthor/foobarbaz")
install_gitorious("packageauthor/foobarbaz")

(As with installr, you may need to install.packages("remotes") first.)

9. There is no source version of the package

Although the binary version of your package is available, the source version is not. You can turn off this check by setting

options(install.packages.check.source = "no")

as described in this SO answer by imanuelc and the Details section of ?install.packages.

10. The package is in a non-standard repository

Your package is in a non-standard repository (e.g. Rbbg). Assuming that it is reasonably compliant with CRAN standards, you can still download it using install.packages; you just have to specify the repository URL.

install.packages("Rbbg", repos = "http://r.findata.org")

RHIPE on the other hand isn't in a CRAN-like repository and has its own installation instructions.

Dmitry

In the latest R (3.2.3) there is a bug, preventing it some times from finding correct package. The workaround is to set repository manually:

install.packages("lubridate", dependencies=TRUE, repos='http://cran.rstudio.com/')

Found solution in other question

Saba

There seems to be a problem with some versions of R and libcurl. I have had the same problem on Mac (R version 3.2.2) and Ubuntu (R version 3.0.2) and in both instances it was resolved simply by running this before the install.packages command

options(download.file.method = "wget")

The solution was suggested by a friend, however, I haven't been able to find it in any of the forums, hence submitting this answer for others.

PaladiN

This solution might break R but here is an easiest solution that works 99% of time.

You need to do is just:

install.packages('package-name',repos='http://cran.us.r-project.org')

As mentioned by the author over here

11. R (or another dependency) is out of date and you don't want to update it.

Warning this is not exactly best practice.

Download the package source.
Navigate to the DESCRIPTION file.
Remove the offending line with your text editor e.g.
```
Depends: R (>= 3.1.1)
```
Install from local (i.e. from the parent directory of DESCRIPTION) e.g.
```
install.packages("foo", type="source", repos=NULL)
```

One thing that happened for me is that the version of R provided by my linux distribution (R version 3.0.2 provided by Ubuntu 14.04) was too old for the latest version of the package available on CRAN (in my case, plyr version 1.8.3 as of today). The solution was to use the packaging system of my distribution instead of trying to install from R (apt-get install r-cran-plyr got me version 1.8.1 of plyr). Maybe I could have tried to update R using updateR(), but I'm afraid that doing so would interfere with my distribution's package manager.

Tombart

This saved me a lot of time debugging what's wrong. In many cases are just mirrors out of date. This function can install multiple packages with their dependencies using https://cran.rstudio.com/:

packages <- function(pkg){
    new.pkg <- pkg[!(pkg %in% installed.packages()[, "Package"])]
    if (length(new.pkg))
        install.packages(new.pkg, dependencies = TRUE, repos='https://cran.rstudio.com/')
    sapply(pkg, require, character.only = TRUE)
}

packages(c("foo", "bar", "baz"))

I fixed this error on Ubuntu by carefully following the instructions for installing R. This included:

adding deb http://cran.utstat.utoronto.ca/bin/linux/ubuntu trusty/ to my /etc/apt/sources.list file
Running sudo apt-get update
Running sudo apt-get install r-base-dev

For step 1 you can chose any CRAN download mirror in place of my University of Toronto one if you would like.

This is what I finally could do for installing psych package in R-3.4.1 when I got the same warning

1:Googled for that package.

2:downloaded it manually having tar.gz extension

3:Chose the option "Package Archive File (.zip;.tar.gz)" for install packages in R

4:browsed locally to the place where it was downloaded and clicked install

You may get a warning: dependencies 'xyz' not available for the package ,then first install those from the repository and then do steps 3-4 .

I had the same problem (on Linux) which could be solved changing the proxy settings. If you are behind a proxy server check the configuration using Sys.getenv("http_proxy") within R. In my ~/.Renviron I had the following lines (from https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200488488-Configuring-R-to-Use-an-HTTP-or-HTTPS-Proxy) causing the problem:

http_proxy=https://proxy.dom.com:port
http_proxy_user=user:passwd

Changing it to

http_proxy="http://user:passwd@proxy.dom.com:port"

solved the problem. You can do the same for https.

It was not the first thought when I read "package xxx is not available for r version-x-y-z" ...

HTH

I made the mistake of forgetting to put repos=NULL when installing the R package from source code. In this case the error message is slightly misleading: package 'foobarbaz' is not available (for R version x.y.z)

The problem was not the version of R, it was the repos parameter. I did install.packages('path/to/source/code/of/foobarbaz', type='source', repos=NULL) which worked for me in this occasion.

Hope this helps someone.

BioProgram

It almost always works for me when I use bioconductor as source and then invoke biocLite. Example:

source("https://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("preprocessCore")

Another minor addition, while trying to test for an old R version using the docker image rocker/r-ver:3.1.0

The default repos setting is MRAN and this fails to get many packages.
That version of R doesn't have https, so, for example: install.packages("knitr", repos = "https://cran.rstudio.com") seems to work.

As mentioned here (in French), this can happen when you have two versions of R installed on your computer. Uninstall the oldest one, then try your package installation again! It worked fine for me.

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15672906/package-is-not-available-for-r-version-2-15-2

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