versions installs specified versions of R packages hosted on
CRAN and provides functions to list available versions and the versions
of currently installed packages. These tools can be used to help make R
projects and packages more reproducible. versions fits in the
narrow gap between the devtools
install_version function and the checkpoint
package, using Revolution Analytics’ MRAN
snapshot server.
You can list the versions of a package that have been on CRAN, when they were added and whether they are available for versions to install.
available.versions(c('checkpoint', 'devtools'))$checkpoint
version date available
1 0.3.15 2015-09-15 TRUE
2 0.3.10 2015-04-27 TRUE
3 0.3.9 2015-03-17 TRUE
4 0.3.3 2014-10-10 TRUE
5 0.3.2 2014-10-01 TRUE
$devtools
version date available
1 1.9.1 2015-09-11 TRUE
2 1.8.0 2015-05-09 TRUE
3 1.7.0 2015-01-17 TRUE
4 1.6.1 2014-10-07 TRUE
5 1.6 2014-09-23 TRUE
6 1.5 2014-04-07 FALSE
7 1.4.1 2013-11-27 FALSE
8 1.4 2013-11-20 FALSE
9 1.3 2013-07-04 FALSE
...You can install the version you want.
install.versions('checkpoint', '0.3.9')And check which version you have currently installed.
installed.versions('checkpoint')[1] "0.3.9"
You can also install the live version on CRAN on a specific date.
install.dates('checkpoint', '2015-01-01')The package is on CRAN so you can install it with:
install.packages('versions')You can also install straight from GitHub using
devtools:
devtools::install_github('goldingn/versions')devtools::install_version installs a stated package
version from source files stored on the CRAN archives. However CRAN does
not store binary versions of packages so Windows users need to have
RTools installed and Windows and OSX users get longer installation
times.
checkpoint uses the Revolution Analytics MRAN server to
install packages (from source or binary) as they were available on a
given date. It also provides a helpful interface to detect the packages
in use in a directory and install all of those packages for a given
date. checkpoint doesn’t provide
install.packages-like functionality however, and that’s
what versions aims to do, by querying MRAN.
As MRAN only goes back to 2014-09-17, versions can only install packages on or after this date.