dbplyr allows you to use remote database tables by converting dplyr code into SQL.ĭata.table backend by automatically translating to the equivalent, but usually much faster, data.table code.There are also two packages that allow you to interface with different backends using the same dplyr syntax: You’ll need to pair DBI with a database specific backends likeĭplyr, there are five packages (includingįorcats) which are designed to work with specific types of data: Readr, for reading flat files, the tidyverse package installs a number of other packages for reading data: They are not loaded automatically with library(tidyverse), so you’ll need to load each one with its own call to library(). The tidyverse also includes many other packages with more specialised usage. R uses factors to handle categorical variables, variables that have a fixed and known set of possible values. Lastly, the computers that I am working with on the cluster are Unix x86_64.Forcats provides a suite of useful tools that solve common problems with factors. In addition, I would also like to make sure that the packages are installed to a location of my choice since I do not have the permission to 'write' in the default R directory (I believe that I can do this within R by using the. Ideally, I would like to download the packages files from CRAN to my computer, then upload these files to the cluster and install them using the appropriate commands in R. Unfortunately the people in charge of my cluster are not being helpful in setting this up so I'm forced to consider this alternative approach. Note: I am aware that there is a way to avoid this issue by using an HTTP proxy as described in the R FAQ.

Since I am only using a few packages in my R code, I was hoping to avoid using the install.packages function by downloading and installing the packages manually. I am currently trying to run some R code on a computing cluster but cannot run the install.packages function due to some weird firewall settings on my cluster.

Download packages in r