pak

A Fresh Approach to R Package Installation

pak installs R packages from CRAN, Bioconductor, GitHub, and local files and directories. It is an alternative to install.packages() and devtools::install_github(). pak is fast, safe and convenient.

Installation

Install the released version of the package from CRAN:

install.packages("pak")

(After installation, you might also want to run pak::pak_setup(); it’ll be run automatically when needed but you might want to do it now to save some time later.)

Install the development version from our repository on GitHub:

install.packages("pak", repos = "https://r-lib.github.io/p/pak/dev/")

This is currently supported for

• macOS (Mojave or later) and R 3.3.x or later, including R-devel (but no native M1 support yet).
• Windows and R 3.3.x, or later, including R-devel,
• Linux (any 64-bit distribution) and R 3.3.x or later, including R-devel.

Usage

Call pkg_install() to install CRAN or Bioconductor packages:

pak::pkg_install("usethis")

To install GitHub packages, use the user/repo syntax:

pak::pkg_install("r-lib/usethis")

All dependencies will be installed as well, to the same library.

On GitHub Actions

The r-lib/actions repository has an R CMD check GitHub Action that uses pak to install packages: https://github.com/r-lib/actions/blob/master/examples/check-pak.yaml To set up this action for your own repository, run

usethis::use_github_action("check-pak")
usethis::use_github_action("test-coverage-pak")
usethis::use_github_action("pkgdown-pak")

from R. The last two are a test coverage action and a pkgdown action.

Why pak?

Fast

• Fast downloads and HTTP queries. pak performs all HTTP requests concurrently.

• Fast installs. pak builds and installs packages concurrently.

• Metadata and package cache. pak caches package metadata and all downloaded packages locally. It does not download the same package files over and over again.

• Lazy installation. pak only installs the packages that are really necessary for the installation. If the requested package and its dependencies are already installed, pak does nothing.

Safe

• Private library (pak’s own package dependencies do not affect your regular package libraries and vice versa).

• Every pak operation runs in a sub-process, and the packages are loaded from the private library. pak avoids loading packages from your regular package libraries. (These package files would be locked on some systems, and locked packages cannot be updated. pak does not load any package in the main process, except for pak itself).

• To avoid updating locked packages, pak offers the choice of unloading them from the current R session, and/or killing other R sessions locking them.

• Dependency solver. pak makes sure that you end up in a consistent, working state of dependencies. It finds conflicts up front, before attempting installation.

Convenient

• BioC packages. pak supports Bioconductor packages out of the box. It uses the Bioconductor version that is appropriate for your R version.

• GitHub packages. pak supports GitHub packages out of the box. It also supports the Remotes entry in DESCRIPTION files, so that GitHub dependencies of GitHub packages will also get installed. See e.g. https://cran.r-project.org/package=remotes/vignettes/dependencies.html

• Easy time travel with MRAN and RSPM, to a specific date or when a certain R or package version was released.

• Package sizes. For CRAN packages pak shows the total sizes of packages it needs to download.

• Other package sources:

  • local package files and directories,
  • URLs to package files or package tree archives.

Roadmap

• Support GitLab repositories
• Support Bitbucket repositories
• Support system requirements
• Support older CRAN package versions
• Support older BioConductor package versions
• Support local CRAN mirrors
• Support the Additional_repositories DESCRIPTION field
• Support SVN repos

License

GPL-3 © RStudio