Update all packages from GitHub

Question

I know you can install packages from CRAN with this syntax:

install.packages(c("Rcpp"), dependencies=TRUE) 

You can update all of them from CRAN with:

update.packages() 

On the other side, you can install packages (compiling them) from GitHub with:

install_github("hadley/tidyr") 

How can you upgrade all GitHub packages?

I mean without reinstalling (and compiling) them one at a time. Something like update.packages() for github.

Answer 1

This works for me. It goes through all of the packages in your library, not only loaded packages.

update_github_pkgs <- function() {    # check/load necessary packages   # devtools package   if (!("package:devtools" %in% search())) {     tryCatch(require(devtools), error = function(x) {warning(x); cat("Cannot load devtools package \n")})     on.exit(detach("package:devtools", unload=TRUE))   }    pkgs <- installed.packages(fields = "RemoteType")   github_pkgs <- pkgs[pkgs[, "RemoteType"] %in% "github", "Package"]    print(github_pkgs)   lapply(github_pkgs, function(pac) {     message("Updating ", pac, " from GitHub...")      repo = packageDescription(pac, fields = "GithubRepo")     username = packageDescription(pac, fields = "GithubUsername")      install_github(repo = paste0(username, "/", repo))   }) } 

Answer 2

library(devtools)  #' Update all github installed packages. #' #' This will trash any non-master branch installs, and spend time re-installing #' packages which are already up-to-date. update_github <- function() {   pkgs = loadedNamespaces()   print(pkgs)   desc <- lapply(pkgs, packageDescription, lib.loc = NULL)   for (d in desc) {     message("working on ", d$Package)     if (!is.null(d$GithubSHA1)) {       message("Github found")       install_github(repo = d$GithubRepo, username = d$GithubUsername)     }   } }  # test it: # install github version of tidyr install_github("hadley/tidyr") library(tidyr) update_github() 

Don't run this if you have any github installations from anything more complicated than the master branch of user/repo. Also be careful if you have a lot of github installations, since this will blindly reinstall them all, even if up-to-date. This could take a long time, and also might break working packages if github master branches are not in tip top condition.

Take a look at devtools R/session_info.r for details.