install: All about installing pak.

In pak: Another Approach to Package Installation

All about installing pak.

Description

Read this if the default installation methods do not work for you or if you want the release candidate or development version.

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 3.4.0 - R-devel
Linux	aarch64	R 3.4.0 - R-devel
macOS High Sierra+	x86_64	R 3.4.0 - R-devel
macOS Big Sur+	aarch64	R 4.1.0 - R-devel
Windows	x86_64	R 3.4.0 - R-devel
Windows	aarch64	R 4.4.0 - R-devel
FreeBSD 13.x or later	x86_64	R 4.4.x
OpenBSD 7.4, 7.5, 7.6	x86_64	R 4.2.x (7.4, 7.5), R 4.4.x (7.6)
NetBSD 10.0	x86_64	R 4.4.x
DragonFly BSD 6.4	x86_64	R 4.3.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
))

pak documentation built on April 27, 2026, 5:07 p.m.