How to download the entire CRAN repository?

Question

For offline linux machines without Internet, installing R packages with lots of dependencies is a nightmare. I found couple of posts in SE discussing on how to create a loca

Answer 1

You can use the function available.packages to find the available packages.

pkgnames <- available.packages()[,1]

If you like web scraping you can practice as follows.

library(rvest)
pkgs <- read_html("https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_name.html")
tab <- html_nodes(pkgs, "table") %>% html_table(fill = TRUE)

pkgnames <- tab[[1]][1]$X1
pkgnames <- pkgnames[nchar(pkgnames)>0]

DON'T RUN THESE UNLESS YOU WANT TO INSTALL (OR DOWNLOAD) A LOT OF PACKAGES!!

#sapply(pkgnames, install.packages)
#sapply(pkgnames, install.packages)

You can run this line to show that it works.

sapply(pkgnames[1:2], install.packages)

You can replace the install.packages with download.packages along with the destdir argument to save it to your corporate directory.