R Fundamentals II

R packages

R Packages

It is possible to add functions to R by writing a package, or by obtaining a package written by someone else. As of this writing, there are over 16,000 packages available on CRAN (the comprehensive R archive network). Their number increases every day:

R and RStudio have functionality for managing packages:

• You can see what packages are installed by typing installed.packages()
• You can install packages by typing install.packages("packagename"), where packagename is the package name, in quotes.
• You can update installed packages by typing update.packages()
• You can remove a package with remove.packages("packagename")
• You can make a package available for use with library(packagename)

Install and load the data.table package:

install.packages("data.table")
library(data.table)

Packages can also be viewed, loaded, and detached in the Packages tab of the lower right panel in RStudio. Clicking on this tab will display all of installed packages with a checkbox next to them. If the box next to a package name is checked, the package is loaded and if it is empty, the package is not loaded. Click an empty box to load that package and click a checked box to detach that package.

Packages can be installed and updated from the Package tab with the Install and Update buttons at the top of the tab.