Task Automation Tools/Scripts Built in R

Installing from GitHub

While CRAN is still by far the most popular repository for R packages, you will find quite a lot of packages that are only available from GitHub. Furthermore, if you’d liked to try out the latest development versions of the automaton package you will have to install them from GitHub.

Before you can install any package from GitHub, you need to install the remotes package from CRAN.

install.packages("remotes")

Now you can install any package from GitHub by providing "username/repository" as argument to remotes::install_github(). For example, to install the latest development version of {automaton} from GitHub run this command.

remotes::install_github("mohitshrestha/automaton")

Please note that installing a package from GitHub means that you have to install it from source. This requires a proper development environment including (at the minimum) a C and FORTRAN compiler. On Linux and macOS that’s a given but on Windows it’s not. More on that below where I discuss the difference between installing binaries vs. installing from source.