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Updating R Packages Automatically

By John Myles White on 8.25.2009

Here’s a very naive program I just wrote to update all of the R packages I have on my system after I update the core R binary. Please let me know if there’s anything obviously wrong with this, such as failing to update items with chains of dependencies.

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all.packages <- installed.packages()
r.version <- paste(version[['major']], '.', version[['minor']], sep = '')
 
for (i in 1:nrow(all.packages))
{
    package.name <- all.packages[i, 1]
    package.version <- all.packages[i, 3]
    if (package.version != r.version)
    {
        print(paste('Installing', package.name))
        install.packages(package.name)
    }
}

Posted in | 2 Responses

2 responses to “Updating R Packages Automatically”

  1. Bryan
    Bryan 10.1.2009 at 1:57 pm |

    Why not just use update.packages() ?

  2. John Myles White
    John Myles White 10.1.2009 at 6:20 pm |

    Because I didn’t know it existed? Thanks for pointing it out, Bryan. From now I’ll just run this command regularly:


    update.packages(ask = FALSE, dependencies = c('Suggests'))

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