R Packages in LASER

VREs within LASER lack internet connectivity by design, so R packages cannot be installed from CRAN.

Instead, they can be made available to a shared file store (R: drive) to which all VREs/researchers will have read access to.

Members of the DAT can make packages available to be installed to a VRE from this repository instead of CRAN.

A copy of these instructions has been made available from within LASER VREs at R:\Instructions.

Installing packages

Once a package has been made available to R: drive it can be installed to a library within a VRE.

All researchers should have read access to R: drive from all VREs.

The method is the same as usual, we just need to point to the miniCRAN repository on R: drive.

Add package name(s) to pkg (eg. pkg <- c("rJava", "seriation")) and run to install package(s) and dependencies from the LASER miniCRAN repository:

# Set variable values
pkg <- c()
pth <- "file:///R:/miniCRAN"

# Install package(s) from LASER miniCRAN
install.packages(pkg, repos = pth)

When installing packages you may see a warning message about Rtools not being installed. You can ignore this warning. Rtools is installed and the required package will have installed properly.

If a required package is not currently available please contact a member of the DAT at ircdst@leeds.ac.uk