Is there an option to install R packages without documentation for more efficient storing?

Question

I am installing packages based on a Docker file in a machine with very small storage capacities. My question is whether there is any way to install a more lightweight version of R packages that avoids non-critical bits of the package for deployed code such as the documentation. Is there a way to do this through install.packages? Otherwise, is there any other way to do it?

Demaggio

This is kind of odd, in that the size of libraries is usually dwarfed by the size of the data files one is going to process with R . – Gharry

Answer 1

You can manually specify what you'd like to have installed, for example: R CMD INSTALL [options] <package-name> or with install.packages("package-name", INSTALL_opts = c("--option1", "--option2")) where relevant options for your case might be the following:

      --no-docs     do not install HTML, LaTeX or examples help
      --no-html     do not build HTML help
      --no-R, --no-libs, --no-data, --no-help, --no-demo, --no-exec,
      --no-inst
            suppress installation of the specified part of the
            package for testing or other special purposes
      --libs-only   only install the libs directory
      --data-compress=  none, gzip (default), bzip2 or xz compression
            to be used for lazy-loading of data
      --resave-data re-save data files as compactly as possible
      --compact-docs    re-compress PDF files under inst/doc

Diactinic

Answer 2

Alternatively you could use install2.r from the littler package as described here as a simple way to ensure that building is quitted if an error occurrs or to choose whether you'd also like to include dependencies.

Regarding a lightweight installation, and corresponding to the suggestion by Mat D., you could use littler and docopt packages in combination with install2.r. Besides the options that are provided, you can also include R CMD INSTALL arguments. The procedure is described here

When the library location (libloc) is set, you can use docopt to specify the desired installation details.

For instance, install2.r -n 4 ggplot2 --no-html will allow parallel installation using 4 processes and install ggplot2 without HTML help. You can specify an individual installation process for each desired package whereas dependencies are set to NA by default.

Mopey