I have an Debian VM which is not connected to internet. Yet, I can still scp any file from my local machine which does have internet connection. To provide a little bit context, I am trying to host an shiny app on the VM.
I can still install an old version of R 3.1.1 with the "apt-get" command:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r-base
sudo apt-get install r-base-dev
Yet, still can't find the "shiny" package when check the list:
sudo apt-cache search "^r-.*" | sort
So, I am thinking whether I could just scp the "shiny.tar.gz" to the VM and install the package locally? How could I install any R package offline?
I have tried somethings like:
install.packages('/home/mli/R/dir_pkg/shiny/shiny_0.13.2.tar.gz', repos = NULL, type = "source")
Yet, it didn't go through and error message as below:
Installing package into ‘/usr/local/lib/R/site-library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Error in type == "both" :
comparison (1) is possible only for atomic and list types
Calls: install.packages
Execution halted
Then, I tried it with another "R CMD":
R CMD INSTALL /home/mli/R/dir_pkg/shiny/shiny_0.13.2.tar.gz
I got error message telling me that dependencies is missing:
* installing to library ‘/home/mli/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.1’
ERROR: dependencies ‘httpuv’, ‘mime’, ‘jsonlite’, ‘xtable’, ‘digest’, ‘htmltools’, ‘R6’ are not available for package ‘shiny’
* removing ‘/home/mli/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.1/shiny’
How can I successfully install shiny package from source? Should I go ahead to install all dependencies and dependencies of dependencies first?
Shiny has a few package dependencies, and "R CMD INSTALL" won't find them for you, so you need to get them manually. According to the description of shiny, it's dependencies are: 'Rcpp’, ‘httpuv’, ‘mime’, ‘jsonlite’, ‘xtable’, ‘digest’, ‘htmltools’, ‘R6’. So first, get the packages from cran (below are current versions, but they do change over time. Note below is for the computer connected to the internet, you'll need to scp these to the offline computer before continuing):
wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Rcpp_0.12.4.tar.gz
wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/httpuv_1.3.3.tar.gz
wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/mime_0.4.tar.gz
wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/jsonlite_0.9.19.tar.gz
wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/digest_0.6.9.tar.gz
wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/htmltools_0.3.5.tar.gz
wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/R6_2.1.2.tar.gz
wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/shiny_0.13.2.tar.gz
Then go through them in that same order with R CMD INSTALL. eg:
R CMD INSTALL Rcpp_0.12.4.tar.gz
Once all the dependencies are there, R CMD INSTALL should let you install shiny.