Install a local R package with dependencies from CRAN mirror

Question

I have built an R package, i.e. I have the mypackage.tar.gz file. This package depends on several other packages, all downloadable and installable from any CRAN mirror.

Answer 1

Here, I'm using untar() with devtools::install() and passing in a directory to which the source tarball has been extracted.

d <- tempdir()
untar("mypackage.tar.gz", compressed="gzip", exdir=d)
devtools::install(file.path(d, "mypackage"), dependencies=TRUE,
                  repos="https://cloud.r-project.org/")

If you want to install from multiple repos, you can provide a list of them. For example, to use both Bioconductor and CRAN, you could run:

 devtools::install(file.path(d, "mypackage"), dependencies=TRUE,
                   repos=BiocManager::repositories())

NOTE: I can't figure out how to directly pass the tarball to install(), but this solution works in the meantime and leaves no clutter because we extract to a temp directory. It seems install_local() should be able to take a tarball, but I am getting an error when attempting to do so.