Install an R package directly from a URL for the package source

Question

I would like to install a package directly from a URL for the package source. I want to do this to make it easy for people to test a pre-release version of the package which should not be widely (or permanently) available. This is a similar question but it is different because it only describes how to install from local files not general URLs.

For the sake of this question I will use a link to the boot package source. Reading ?install.packages particularly the description of the pkgs argument suggests:

install.packages(   "http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/boot/boot_1.3-7.tar.gz",    repos = NULL, type = "source" ) 

However this fails with:

Warning in install.packages :   installation of package    ‘http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/boot/boot_1.3-7.tar.gz’    had non-zero exit status 

Suggesting that the URL is being interpreted as the package name, not its location. We can work around this with the following two step procedure:

download.file(   "http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/boot/boot_1.3-7.tar.gz",    "boot" ) install.packages("boot", repos = NULL, type = "source") 

But I would prefer to do this with a single call to install.packages only; and since install.packages is capable of downloading files anyway I feel this should be possible.

Answer 1

install.packages now works with http URLs (not https yet) as of 3.1.1. This works for me:

install.packages("http://www.lepem.ufc.br/jaa/colorout_1.1-0.tar.gz", repos=NULL) 

Edit: As of R 3.2.0, https is builtin via libcurl. This should work now:

install.packages("https://github.com/hadley/devtools/archive/v1.7.0.tar.gz",                  repos=NULL, method="libcurl") 

Edit: As of R 3.2.2, https should work with default options assuming libcurl support was compiled in.

Edit 2016-04-20: There may be some issues downloading packages hosted on S3, but method='wget' seems to work for those for now.

Answer 2

See ?install_url in the devtools package.