Make package in R not required to load when I startup R/RStudio?

Question

I have looked extensively to find the answer to this before asking and could not find the answer, but if its out there please point me to it. Every time I start R studio I have packages that load automatically like:

Loading required package: RMySQL
Loading required package: DBI
Loading required package: cocor
Loading required package: RMySQL

I would like these packages to stop loading automatically every time I start R studio, and have tried uninstalling and reinstalling R and R studio in addition to the following:

detach("package:RMySQL",unload=TRUE)

For all three of these packages and it doesn't work. Please help! Thank you.

sapply(ls(), function(x) class(get(x)))
named list()

Answer 1

Look at this post and you probably want to find your .RProfile file. Look at ?Startup (note capital S) for more help. The .RProfile is should be under the /etc/ folder underneath wherever R is installed on your machine. Per the post above, a fast way to find its location would be to run the following:

candidates <- c( Sys.getenv("R_PROFILE"),
                 file.path(Sys.getenv("R_HOME"), "etc", "Rprofile.site"),
                 Sys.getenv("R_PROFILE_USER"),
                 file.path(getwd(), ".Rprofile") )

Filter(file.exists, candidates)

Answer 2

From the comments you've posted, it looks like you're running Windows. The location for a user .RProfile can be shown using:

(my_rprofile <- file.path(Sys.getenv("R_USER"), ".RProfile"))

You can then check whether that file exists using:

file.exists(my_rprofile)

and if this returns TRUE, open it for editing using:

file.edit(my_rprofile)

If the file isn't there, try:

file.exists(".RProfile")

and if TRUE:

file.edit(".RProfile")

If you execute this command within RStudio, you should get a window open with the current contents of your .RProfile. I suspect it includes something along the lines of:

library("RMySQL")

which you then need to remove as appropriate before saving.

Other things to check:

Sys.getenv("R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES")
# should be blank
.First
# should give an error that .First not found

If .First is set and you don't have a .RProfile file, you might have it defined in file.path(Sys.getenv("R_USER"), ".RData") and it would be worth renaming that file (or disabling restoring .RData in the RStudio options.

Even if .First is undefined, I'd still try loading R/RStudio without restoring from .RData since it may be that you're restoring some S4 objects which depend on those packages.