Errors installing new package…what do you do when you encounter errors?

installing packages blog

• we want to install the “emo” packages
• we found that install.packages(“emo”) didn’t work and resulted in an error…why??!!
• packages may or may not exist on CRAN, but install.packages() will only work for packages that exist on CRAN
• so if you search for a package on CRAN and it’s not there what should you do? …I’d do a Google search for “install package X in R”
• I often find that if packages aren’t on CRAN they are on github, so you can locate the repository and install the package via devtools
• you’ll need to install devtools if it’s not already installed
• make sure to restart your R session after installing devtools
• also make sure to loab it in library(devtools)
• there’s an install_github function to install R packages hosted on GitHub in the devtools package
• install_github(“DeveloperName/PackageName”)

# commented out how to uninstall packages:

# library(installr)
# uninstall.packages("emo")

install.packages("emo") 

install.packages("devtools")

# you can either run one line altogether like this:
devtools::install_github("hadley/emo")

# or you can run two lines like this:
library(devtools)
install_github("hadley/emo")

library(emo)
emo::ji("smile")

Learning Something New

How to choose where to start???

Where to Start 2

• if you’re just looking to new things in general then tutorials are a great option because they’ll cover a range of topics
• however, if you have a specific problem then blog posts are often a better place to start because they will walk you through how to use a given package
• tip from Jenny R: when she is trying to learn something new, she’ll Google “how to do X in R blog”
• if you’ve used a package before, but can’t remember the arguments or just want to see one quick example then start with the R documentation (often there will be examples at the bottom of the documentation)