In r-lib/pkgman: Another Approach to Package Installation

Pre-built binaries

Our pre-built binaries have the advantage that they are completely self-containted 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 | | 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`, `rc` and `devel` streams

We have three types of binaries available:

stable corresponds to the latest CRAN release of CRAN.
rc is a release candidate build, and it is available about 1-2 weeks before a release. Otherwise it is the same as the stable build.
devel has builds from the development tree. Before release it might be the same as the rc build.

The streams are available under different repository URLs:

stream <- "rc"
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
))