How to install R packages that are not available in "R-essentials"?

Question

I use an out-of-the-box Anaconda installation to work with Python. Now I have read that it is possible to also "include" the R world within this installation and to use the IR kernel within the Jupyter/Ipython notebook.

I found the command to install a number of famous R packages: conda install -c r r-essentials

My beginner's question:

How do I install R packages that are not included in the R-essential package? For example R packages that are available on CRAN. "pip" works only for PyPI Python packages, doesn't it?

Answer 1

Now I have found the documentation:

This is the documentation that explains how to generate R packages that are only available in the CRAN repository: https://www.continuum.io/content/conda-data-science

Go to the section "Building a conda R package".

(Hint: As long as the R package is available under anaconda.org use this resource. See here: https://www.continuum.io/blog/developer/jupyter-and-conda-r)

alistaire's answer is another possibility to add R packages:

If you install packages from inside of R via the regular install.packages (from CRAN mirrors), or devtools::install_github (from GitHub), they work fine. @alistaire

How to do this: Open your (independent) R installation, then run the following command:

install.packages("png", "/home/user/anaconda3/lib/R/library") 

to add new package to the correct R library used by Jupyter, otherwise the package will be installed in /home/user/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/png/libs mentioned in .libPaths() .

Answer 2

To install other R Packages on Jupyter beyond R-essentials

install.packages('readr', repos='http://cran.us.r-project.org') 

One issue is that the specific repository is the US.R-Project (as below). I tried others and it did not work.

N.B. Replace readr with any desired package name to install.