Listing R Package Dependencies Without Installing Packages

Question

Is there a simple way to get a list of R package dependencies (all recursive dependencies) for a given package, without installing the package and it's dependencies? Something similar to a fake install in portupgrade or apt.

Answer 1

You can use the result of the available.packages function. For example, to see what ggplot2 depends on :

pack <- available.packages() pack["ggplot2","Depends"] 

Which gives :

[1] "R (>= 2.14), stats, methods" 

Note that depending on what you want to achieve, you may need to check the Imports field, too.