Miscellaneous Package Related Functions

The pkgs %installed in% lib.loc operator checks if one or more given packages (pkgs) exist in the given library paths (lib.loc), without loading the packages at all.
The syntax of this operator forces the user to make it syntactically explicit where to look for installed R-packages.
As pkgs %installed in% lib.loc does not even load a package, the user can safely use it without fearing any unwanted side-effects.

The pkg_get_deps() function gets the direct dependencies of a package from the Description file. It works on non-CRAN packages also.

The pkg_get_deps_minimal() function is the same as pkg_get_deps(), except with base, recom, semi, shared_tidy all set to FALSE, and the default value for deps_type is c("Depends", "Imports").

Usage

pkgs %installed in% lib.loc

pkg_get_deps(
  package,
  lib.loc = .libPaths(),
  deps_type = c("LinkingTo", "Depends", "Imports"),
  base = FALSE,
  recom = TRUE,
  semi = TRUE,
  shared_tidy = TRUE
)

pkg_get_deps_minimal(
  package,
  lib.loc = .libPaths(),
  deps_type = c("Depends", "Imports")
)

Arguments

pkgs: a character vector with the package name(s).
lib.loc: character vector specifying library search path (the location of R library trees to search through).
The lib.loc argument would usually be .libPaths().
See also loadNamespace.
For pkg_get_deps() and pkg_get_deps_minimal():
lib.loc can also be set to NULL.
In that case the loaded namespace of the package will be checked instead of the installed packages at lib.loc.
If lib.loc is NULL, but the package is not loaded, an error is returned.
package: a single string giving the package name.
deps_type: a character vector, giving the dependency types to be used.
The order of the character vector given in deps_type affects the order of the returned character vector; see Details sections.
base: TRUE or FALSE, indicating whether base/core R should be included (TRUE), or not included (FALSE).
recom: TRUE or FALSE, indicating whether the pre-installed 'recommended' R-packages should be included (TRUE), or not included (FALSE).
semi: TRUE or FALSE, indicating whether semi-ingrained R-packages ('S7', 'rstudioapi') should be included (TRUE) or not include (FALSE).
shared_tidy: TRUE or FALSE, indicating whether the following packages should be included (TRUE) or not included (FALSE):
'rlang', 'lifecycle', 'cli', 'glue', and 'withr'.

Value

For pkgs %installed in% lib.loc:
Returns a named logical vector.
The names give the package names.
The value TRUE indicates a package is installed in lib.loc.
The value FALSE indicates a package is not installed in lib.loc.
The value NA indicates a package is not actually a separate package, but base/core 'R' (i.e. 'base', 'stats', etc.).

For pkg_get_deps() and pkg_get_deps_minimal():
A character vector of direct dependencies, without duplicates.

Details

For pkg_get_deps():
For each string in argument deps_type, the package names in the corresponding field of the Description file are extracted, in the order as they appear in that field.
The order given in argument deps_type also affects the order of the returned character vector:
For example, c("LinkingTo", "Depends", "Imports"),
means the package names are extracted from the fields in the following order:

"LinkingTo";
"Depends";
"Imports".

The unique (thus non-repeating) package names are then returned to the user.

References

O'Brien J., elegantly extract R-package dependencies of a package not listed on CRAN. Stack Overflow. (1 September 2023). https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30223957/elegantly-extract-r-package-dependencies-of-a-package-not-listed-on-cran

Examples

"dplyr" %installed in% .libPaths()
#> dplyr 
#>  TRUE 

pkg_get_deps_minimal("dplyr")
#> [1] "generics"   "magrittr"   "pillar"     "R6"         "tibble"    
#> [6] "tidyselect" "vctrs"     
pkgs <- pkg_get_deps("dplyr")
pkgs %installed in% .libPaths()
#>        cli   generics       glue  lifecycle   magrittr     pillar         R6 
#>       TRUE       TRUE       TRUE       TRUE       TRUE       TRUE       TRUE 
#>      rlang     tibble tidyselect      vctrs 
#>       TRUE       TRUE       TRUE       TRUE