Is there an easy way of replicating a list of installed CRAN packages (with the exact versions)?

Question

I develop code in R on multiple computers. Said code depends on many CRAN packages, and I want to make sure that the version of the packages my code depends on are kept in sync. So I am looking for a easy way of replicating a list of installed CRAN packages (with the same version) on another computer.

For people who also know Python, I am looking for an equivalent to pip freeze. Running pip freeze prints out a list of packages installed with their version. Then on another computer, I can feed this file back to pip and it installs the exact same version of all the packages listed. (What I do not want is something that installs the latest version on the other computer.)

Is there an easy way of doing this in R (or a tool that already does this), or do I have to roll my own?

Answer 1

Have you looked at installed.packages() ?

R> IP <- installed.packages()
R> colnames(IP) 
 [1] "Package"   "LibPath"   "Version"   "Priority"  "Depends"   "Imports" 
 [7] "LinkingTo" "Suggests"  "Enhances"  "OS_type"   "License"   "Built"  
R> dim(IP)
[1] 284  12  
R>    

You could then roll a corresponding install.packages() over it on the other side, possibly with an additional layer of fetching versions from the 'Archive' section on CRAN.