r - tidyverse not loaded, it says "namespace ‘vctrs’ 0.2.0 is already loaded, but >= 0.2.1 is required"

Question

I keep encountering problems with installing tidyverse package, which preventing me from implementing many text processing tasks. The problem is the same as those mentioned in many previous threads since 2017 in that when I enter library(tidyverse) or try to open other related packages, they always say it requires 0.2.1 version of vctrs. I have tried using remote download or download other temporary versions but to avail. Could someone help me on this?

I'm using the latest version of R (version 3.6.1), running on Rstudio 1.2.5033. I also updated my vctrs package.

install.packages("tidyverse")
devtools::install_github("tidyverse/tidyverse")
library(tidyverse)
Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘tidyverse’ in loadNamespace(i, c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[i]]):
 namespace ‘vctrs’ 0.2.0 is already loaded, but >= 0.2.1 is required
In addition: Warning message:
package ‘tidyverse’ was built under R version 3.6.2 


library(devtools)
devtools::install_github("tidyverse/tidyverse")
library(tidyverse)
Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘tidyverse’ in loadNamespace(i, c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[i]]):
 namespace ‘vctrs’ 0.2.0 is already loaded, but >= 0.2.1 is required
In addition: Warning message:
package ‘tidyverse’ was built under R version 3.6.2 

Answer 1

You've probably got more than one instance of R running with those tidyverse packages loaded. Not sure about other operating systems, but on Windows, if these packages are being used, then those DLL files will be in use and you cannot delete them, which is what the install.packages() function will try to do.

So, just close all but one instance of R, maybe restart the computer just to be sure, and try again.