Script to copy the packages installed on one computer or R version to another. Originally from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1401904/painless-way-to-install-a-new-version-of-r-on-windows

copyInstalledPackages.r

# modified from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1401904/painless-way-to-install-a-new-version-of-r-on-windows

# run on old computer / r version
setwd("/Users/Florian/Dropbox/temp") # or any other existing temp directory
packages <- installed.packages()[,"Package"]
save(packages, file="Rpackages")


# run on new computer / r version
setwd("/Users/Florian/Dropbox/temp") # or any other existing temp directory
load("Rpackages")
for (p in setdiff(packages, installed.packages()[,"Package"]))
install.packages(p)

Hi, good idea, but seems to me that you will still need a dropbox or similar to transfer the info between computers?

True, but renv will do most of the heavy lifting for you. You only have to transfer your projects' code together with the .lock file and occasionally run renv::snapshot() and renv::restore() to keep packages in sync between systems.

renv creates a system-wide cache of packages, but each project gets its own package library: When you run snapshot(), renv stores all info about the packages a project uses in a .lock file. When your run restore() on a new system, it checks in that systems package cache, and if a package you need is missing it installs it from CRAN (or the repo of your choice).

So you only transfer the .lock file and run snapshot() and restore() to keep things in sync. A cool things about this is that the package cache can contain different package versions at the same time and projects on the same system may use different versions of the same package.

renv eliminates the need to transfer and reinstall your whole R package library. Instead you only synchronize the packages you are actually using in your projects, and you are even keeping track of the exact package versions, which is great -- no more package API changes that break your old code.

Here's a good intro talk about renv

OK, I will look at this, thanks for the hint!

Thank you for sharing this

Thanks!