How do I install an R package from source?

Question

A friend sent me along this great tutorial on webscraping NYtimes with R. I would really love to try it. However, the first step is to installed a package called RJSONIO from source.

I know R reasonably well, but I have no idea how to install a package from source.

I'm running Mac OSX.

Answer 1

If you have the file locally, then use install.packages() and set the repos=NULL:

install.packages(path_to_file, repos = NULL, type="source")

Where path_to_file would represent the full path and file name:

• On Windows it will look something like this: "C:\RJSONIO_0.2-3.tar.gz".
• On UNIX it will look like this: "/home/blah/RJSONIO_0.2-3.tar.gz".