In pak: Another Approach to Package Installation

Pre-built binaries

Our pre-built binaries have the advantage that they are completely self-contained and dependency free. No additional R packages, system libraries or tools (e.g. compilers) are needed for them. Install a pre-built binary build of pak from our repository on GitHub:

install.packages("pak", repos = sprintf(
  "https://r-lib.github.io/p/pak/stable/%s/%s/%s",
  .Platform$pkgType,
  R.Version()$os,
  R.Version()$arch
))

This is supported for the following systems:

| OS | CPU | R version | |-----------------------|-----------|-----------------------------------| | Linux | x86_64 | R 3.5.0 - R-devel | | Linux | aarch64 | R 3.5.0 - R-devel | | macOS High Sierra+ | x86_64 | R 3.5.0 - R-devel | | macOS Big Sur+ | aarch64 | R 4.1.0 - R-devel | | Windows | x86_64 | R 3.5.0 - R-devel | | Windows | aarch64 | R 4.4.0 - R-devel | | FreeBSD 13.4 or later | x86_64 | R 4.5.x (13.x), R 4.6.x (later) | | OpenBSD 7.7, 7.8 | x86_64 | R 4.4.x (7.7), R 4.5.x (7.8) | | NetBSD 10.1 | x86_64 | R 4.6.x | | DragonFly BSD 6.4 | x86_64 | R 4.4.x |

Notes

For macOS we only support the official CRAN R build. Other builds, e.g. Homebrew R, are not supported.
We only support R builds that have an R shared library. CRAN's Windows and macOS installers are such, so the the R builds in the common Linux distributions. But this might be an issue if you build R yourself without the --enable-R-shlib option.

Install from CRAN

Install the released version of the package from CRAN as usual:

install.packages("pak")

This potentially needs a C compiler on platforms CRAN does not have binaries packages for.

Nightly builds

We have nightly binary builds, for the same systems as the table above:

install.packages("pak", repos = sprintf(
  "https://r-lib.github.io/p/pak/devel/%s/%s/%s",
  .Platform$pkgType,
  R.Version()$os,
  R.Version()$arch
))

`stable` and `devel` streams

We have three types of binaries available:

stable corresponds to the latest CRAN release of pak.
devel has builds from the development tree.

The streams are available under different repository URLs:

stream <- "stable"
install.packages("pak", repos = sprintf(
  "https://r-lib.github.io/p/pak/%s/%s/%s/%s",
  stream,
  .Platform$pkgType,
  R.Version()$os,
  R.Version()$arch
))