Installing a package offline from GitHub

Question

I'm trying to port some packages to an R installation on an offline (Windows) computer.

From CRAN (let's say data.table), the process: 1) download .zip on separate online computer 2) thumb drive -> offline computer 3) install via install.packages("....zip"...) works exactly as expected.

However, this process broke down when I tried to install from GitHub.

When I run install.packages (note: I'm using type="binary" and repos=NULL; type="win.binary" does nothing either) on the zip file (obtained by going to the package page, e.g. https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table, and using the "Download .zip" function), something goes wrong.

There's no error message (and nothing new from setting verbose=TRUE), and the package folder is added to my library (i.e., I can see the folder named "data.table-master" when I navigate there), but library(data.table) results in the error: "there is no package called data.table". I also noticed that, while the installation from CRAN finishes with "package data.table successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked", I get no such message from an attempted GitHub installation.

What's going on here? I tried all possible leads in ?install.packages, but given I'm not really getting an error message it's been hard to diagnose what exactly is the issue.

More background: R version is 3.2.0. Hard to copy-paste sessionInfo since that computer's not online, not sure what else may be relevant.

Update:

Given @r2evans' comments below, I also tried using type="source" with install.packages, and this didn't work either (same problem--despite having "data.table-master" folder in one of my .libPaths() addresses, library(data.table) gives the error that there's no such package).

I did get some more output from using verbose=TRUE this time, however:

system (cmd0): C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-32~1.0/bin/x64/R CMD INSTALL

1): succeeded 'C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-32~1.0/bin/x64/R CMD INSTALL -l "C:\Users\Mike\Documents\R\win-library\3.2" "E:/data.table-master.zip"'

Answer 1

Let's assume that you have Rtools and devtools on the win machine.

Step 1: Download the source zip.

Step 2: Copy to the win machine and unzip the content there.

Step 3: Run the following code (adjust the path as necessary):

library(devtools)
source <- devtools:::source_pkg("E:/temp/data.table-master")
install(source)

library(data.table)
#loads 1.9.7

Answer 2

You can use install_local from devtools to install a Github package with the zip you've downloaded, e.g. :

library("devtools")
install_local(path = "data.table-master.zip")

But you'll have to install all dependancies first.

Answer 3

Not sure if this is a solution or a workaround. Given a zip file of the source of an R package directory structure:

On a shell:

~$ unzip data.table-master.zip
## optional renaming
~$ mv data.table-master data.table
## create the new
~$ tar czf data.table.tar.gz data.table

There are likely other tools that allow you to extract and re-archive them in a different format. Since I tend towards shell-level access and control, I tend towards these simple tools.

In R:

install.packages("data.table.tar.gz", type="source", repos=NULL)

(This will not succeed unless all dependencies are already installed.)

Answer 4

The following function extracts a GitHub .zip file located at path to a temporary directory and installs the package straight from there, i.e. does not create an interim .tar.gz archive. The function tries to guess the package name but it can also be given through pkg. Temporary files are removed at exit.

This function does not install any dependencies.

install_zip <- function(path,
                        pkg = sub("(-[^-]+)?\\.[^.]+$", "", basename(path))) {
    dir1 <- tempfile()
    dir2 <- file.path(dir1, pkg)
    dir.create(dir2, recursive = TRUE)
    on.exit(unlink(dir1, recursive = TRUE, force = TRUE))
    suppressMessages(unzip(path, exdir = dir2,
                           unzip = getOption("unzip")))
    temp_contents <- dir(dir2)
    if (length(temp_contents) == 1L) {
        dir3 <- file.path(dir2, temp_contents)
        if (file.info(dir3, extra_cols=FALSE)[["isdir"]]) {
            dir2 <- file.path(dir2, pkg)
            file.rename(dir3, dir2)
        }
    }
    install.packages(dir2, repos = NULL, type = "source")
}

Answer 5

So I've finally come up with a workaround that works in some cases... but it's admittedly a bit macgyvered. Would love to hear some feedback about how to make this approach work for any package.

Since I have a package where all of the code is in one .R file, I spoofed a package environment for that package and sourced the functions into that environment. Suppose the package is all in test.R:

#add an appropriately named package to the search() path
attach(environment(), name = "package:pkg")

#source the functions
sys.source("test.R", envir = as.environment("package:pkg"))

Voila. I don't know enough about how packages are loaded to say how to do this, for example, if the package has src code in C or something else.