cachePurge: Purge everything in the Require cache

In Require: Installing and Loading R Packages for Reproducible Workflows

Purge everything in the Require cache

Description

Clears Require's own bookkeeping caches: the available.packages() snapshot, the GitHub SHA database, the DESCRIPTION cache, and the pkgDep memoisation database. These live under cacheDir() and are distinct from the package binary tarball cache.

Usage

cachePurge(packages = FALSE, repos = getOption("repos"))

purgeCache(packages = FALSE, repos = getOption("repos"))

Arguments

packages

Either a character vector of packages to install via install.packages, then load (i.e., with library), or, for convenience, a vector or list (using c or list) of unquoted package names to install and/or load (as in require, but vectorized). Passing vectors of names may not work in all cases, so user should confirm before relying on this behaviour in operational code. In the case of a GitHub package, it will be assumed that the name of the repository is the name of the package. If this is not the case, then pass a named character vector here, where the names are the package names that could be different than the GitHub repository name. As a convenience for copy-pasting long lists, any character element that contains newlines is split into one package per line, with whitespace trimmed and blank or ⁠#⁠-prefixed lines dropped. For example, Require("\n dplyr\n # ggplot2\n PredictiveEcology/LandR@development\n") is equivalent to Require(c("dplyr", "PredictiveEcology/LandR@development")). Alternatively, an unquoted {...} block is accepted, with each line treated as one package spec, e.g. Require({ dplyr; lme4; PredictiveEcology/LandR@development }). Note that R's parser strips comments inside {...} before this function runs, so to omit a package delete the line (or comment it out – both have the same effect). Version constraints such as ⁠pkg (>= 1.0)⁠ do not parse inside {...} and must use the quoted string form.

repos

The remote repository (e.g., a CRAN mirror), passed to either install.packages, install_github or installVersions. When options(Require.usePak = TRUE): repos is added to pak's repository list via options(repos). However, pak always includes CRAN and Bioconductor as built-in defaults regardless of this setting – repos can only add sources, it cannot prevent pak from also searching CRAN. This differs from the default (usePak = FALSE) behaviour where repos strictly controls which repositories are used. Use pak::cache_clean() to clear pak's download cache if needed.

Details

With packages = TRUE, the package binary cache is also cleared by calling cacheClearPackages() – which under usePak = TRUE (the default) delegates to pak::cache_clean(), and under the legacy path walks Require's bookkeeping dir directly.

purgeCache() is a deprecated alias.

Value

Run for its side effect, namely, all cached objects are removed.

Require documentation built on May 16, 2026, 1:06 a.m.