Installing older version of R package

Question

I am trying to use Rpy2 and ggplot2 but I get an error. After some searching for the error online, I found that the error occurs because there are changes in the ggplot2 pac

Answer 1

Pure install.packages method

See this thread on the r-devel mailing list. In reply to Kurt Wheeler, Kurt Hornik reveals an undocumented feature of the CRAN website to specify the specific version of a package.

This method will work as long as you have all required dependencies already installed:

package = "https://cran.r-project.org/package=svglite&version=1.2.1"
utils::install.packages(pkgs = package, repos = NULL)

Note the URL structure above. This addresses the issue that CRAN has a different URL structure for the latest version than for archived versions:

# Latest version (not available at Archive/svglite)
https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/svglite_1.2.1.tar.gz
# Archived version
https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/svglite/svglite_1.2.0.tar.gz

remotes::install_version method

Another option is to use the remotes::install_version function. However, you will need to install the remotes package.