Using install.packages with custom temp dir

Question

I would like to install a package with a security profile that does not have access to /tmp , but has its own temporary directory, for example /tmp/jeroen

Answer 1

The correct answer was given by @hadley in the comments: in order to make sure install.packages uses the custom temporary directory, one needs to do

Sys.setenv(TMPDIR="/tmp/jeroen")

in addition to:

configure.vars="TMPDIR=/tmp/jeroen"

This way both the extraction and the installation of the package avoids the system or user default temporary directory.

Answer 2

The documentation in help(tempdir) pretty clearly states that TMP, TMPDIR, ... are used:

By default, ‘tmpdir’ will be the directory given by ‘tempdir()’. This will be a subdirectory of the per-session temporary directory found by the following rule when the R session is started. The environment variables ‘TMPDIR’, ‘TMP’ and ‘TEMP’ are checked in turn and the first found which points to a writable directory is used: if none succeeds ‘/tmp’ is used.

So if setting one alone does not help, maybe you want to set several, and make sure the permissions on your 'replacement directory' are permissive enough etc pp.