Installing packages

Recommended R packages are included as part of the R installation. A number of popular add-on packages from CRAN, Bioconductor and other sources are readily available via the Fedora repositories. They are named with an R- prefix, such as R-ggplot2. To install a package, run:

$ sudo dnf install R-ggplot2

The following command:

$ sudo dnf repoquery --repo=fedora-source 'R-*'

provides a list of all R packages in Fedora.

Installation from source

If you have the R package installed, thousands of additional add-on packages can be installed from the official CRAN and Bioconductor repositories. To install e.g. the ggplot2 package from source, open the R console and run:

install.packages("ggplot2")

With this method, packages are installed into the user home directory, under ~/R.

See also the remotes package, to learn how to install packages from a variety of sources (e.g., GitHub), and the renv package, to learn how to manage environments and to install specific versions of packages.

Additional binary packages

The cran2copr project maintains binary RPM contributed repositories for the current and previous stable Fedora version for most of CRAN (~17k packages as of Apr 2021) in an automated way using Fedora Copr. These repositories are automatically synchronized with CRAN on a daily basis. To ensure compatibility with the official Fedora repository, these set of packages are named with the R-CRAN- prefix (R-CRAN-ggplot2 for example), and are installed into /usr/local/lib/R/library.

To enable this Copr repository in your system:

$ sudo dnf install 'dnf-command(copr)'
$ sudo dnf copr enable iucar/cran

For integrating binary package installation into your R session, you can install R-CoprManager:

$ sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

With CoprManager, the Copr iucar/cran repository will be used when installing from the R console:

install.packages("car")

If a package is not available, then it just falls back to source installation from CRAN.

On the other hand, remove.packages will still remove only packages installed in your user library. If you want to remove system packages, run:

CoprManager::remove_copr("car")

If you want to disable the CoprManager, so that install.packages only works from source again, then run:

CoprManager::disable()
install.packages("car")

Authors: Iñaki Úcar, Jarek Prokop, Nick Dirschel