[Rd] Runnable R packages

[William Dunlap]

To download a package with all its dependencies and install it, use the
install.packages() functions instead of 'R CMD INSTALL'.  E.g., in bash:

mkdir /tmp/libJunk
env R_LIBS_SITE=libJunk R --quiet -e 'if
(!requireNamespace("purrr",quietly=TRUE)) install.packages("purrr")'

For corporate "production use" you probably want to set up your own
repository containing
fixed versions of packages instead of using CRAN.  Then edd repos="..." to
the install.packages()
call.  Of course you can put this into a package and somehow deal with the
bootstrapping issue.

Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com


On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 8:04 AM David Lindelof <lindelof using ieee.org> wrote:

> Would you care to share how your package installs its own dependencies? I
> assume this is done during the call to `main()`? (Last time I checked, R
> CMD INSTALL would not install a package's dependencies...)
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 4:38 PM Barry Rowlingson <
> b.rowlingson using lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 3:14 PM David Lindelof <lindelof using ieee.org>
> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> In summary, I'm convinced R would benefit from something similar to
> Java's
> >> `Main-Class` header or Python's `__main__()` function. A new R CMD
> command
> >> would take a package, install its dependencies, and run its "main"
> >> function.
> >
> >
> >
> > I just created and built a very boilerplate R package called "runme". I
> > can install its dependencies and run its "main" function with:
> >
> >  $ R CMD INSTALL runme_0.0.0.9000.tar.gz
> >  $ R -e 'runme::main()'
> >
> > No new R CMDs needed. Now my choice of "main" is arbitrary, whereas with
> > python and java and C the entrypoint is more tightly specified (__name__
> ==
> > "__main__" in python, int main(..) in C and so on). But I don't think
> > that's much of a problem.
> >
> > Does that not satisfy your requirements close enough? If you want it in
> > one line then:
> >
> > R CMD INSTALL runme_0.0.0.9000.tar.gz && R -e 'runme::main()'
> >
> > will do the second if the first succeeds (Unix shells).
> >
> > You could write a script for $RHOME/bin/RUN which would be a two-liner
> and
> > that could mandate the use of "main" as an entry point. But good luck
> > getting anything into base R.
> >
> > Barry
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >> If we have this machinery available, we could even consider
> >> reaching out to Spark (and other tech stacks) developers and make it
> >> easier
> >> to develop R applications for those platforms.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
>
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>
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