3  R packages

To install extra R packages, use install.R. This is treated as an R script which is run. For example, you can have a script like

install.R

repo <- "https://p3m.dev/cran/__linux__/jammy/2024-05-13"
list.of.packages <- c("ggplot2","remotes")
install.packages(list.of.packages, repos=repo)
remotes::install_github("hadley/httr@v0.4")

3.0.1 Spatial libraries

Some packages depend on linux packages. One example are spatial packages like sf which depend on GDAL. In this case

install.packages("sf")

will not work because it will not install the linux package dependencies.

There are a few ways to get around this.

  • Install the necessary linux packages via apt-get. This can be hard.

  • Install via via /rocker_scipts/install_geospatial.sh To do this include

    RUN /rocker_scipts/install_geospatial.sh

    in your Dockerfile.

  • Use r2u which has Ubuntu binaries with all the dependencies included.

3.0.2 Default CRAN repository

The default CRAN repository is set in ${R_HOME}/etc/Rprofile.site and the CRAN environmental variable is set to the date pinned version associated with the R version in the image. For example, https://p3m.dev/cran/__linux__/jammy/2024-10-30.

To set a different repo, edit ${R_HOME}/etc/Rprofile.site if you are changing an image or ~/.Rprofile if setting user defaults:

options(repos = c(CRAN = 'https://p3m.dev/cran/__linux__/jammy/latest'), download.file.method = 'libcurl')

You can also specify the repo to use in install.packages() like so

repo <- "https://p3m.dev/cran/__linux__/jammy/latest"
list.of.packages <- c("maps", "mapdata", "RColorBrewer")
install.packages(list.of.packages, repos=repo)