installing package from a local .tar.gz file on Linux

Question

I would like to install the plyr package from a .tar.gz file, into my library of R packages on a linux machine. How would I go about doing this? Do I just place it in the library directory? What if I do not have write permissions?

Answer 1

In the command line:

R CMD INSTALL <package-name>.tar.gz

Or in R:

install.packages(<pathtopackage>, repos = NULL, type="source")

Answer 2

From the command line,

R CMD INSTALL plyr_x.y.z.tar.gz

If you don't have permission to write to the standard library directory and can't use sudo to override, you can install it somewhere else via

R CMD INSTALL -l <user_lib> plyr_x.y.z.tar.gz

where <user_lib> is a directory you can write to. You may need to specify lib.loc when subsequently loading the package, if <user_lib> is not in .libPaths (see @DWin's answer).

See http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html for more information; R CMD INSTALL --help may also be useful, albeit terse.

Answer 3

If you do not have permissions to the default installed library you can add to the search path that R uses with .libPaths which "gets/sets the library trees within which packages are looked for."

.libPaths()  # will display all current libraries
?.libPaths

The second argument to install.packages (after the name of your plyr.version.tar.gz file) could be a user-controlled library directory.

?install.packages

I was a bit puzzled by first asking about installing from CRAN and then asking about installing a tar.gz file from which I formed the impression that you had already downloaded the file and were hoping to install it.