Tutorial

The package “kwb.package” has been developed when the KWB packages were not yet on GitHub but on KWB’s internal Subversion server. That time, it was quite complicated to install KWB packages, especially when a package was depending on further KWB packages. Things got simpler when we moved our packages to GitHub and could use the install_github() function from the “remotes” package to install our packages. Nevertheless, “kwb.package” contains some useful functions about packages in general, such as functions to analyse or plot package dependencies. I will demonstrate the usage of some of these functions here.

Installation

# Install the latest "release" from our R-universe server
install.packages("kwb.package", repos = "https://kwb-r.r-universe.dev")

# Install the development version from GitHub
remotes::install_github("kwb-r/kwb.package@dev")

Cook Book Recipes

What packages does a package depend on?

To find out what packages an R package depends on you may use the function packageDependencies():

# What packages does the package "ggplot2" depend on?
# (including all sub-dependencies)?
kwb.package::packageDependencies("ggplot2")
#> $ggplot2
#> character(0)

# What packages does the package "kwb.package" itself depend on?
kwb.package::packageDependencies("kwb.package")
#> $kwb.package
#>  [1] "gh"          "kwb.utils"   "magrittr"    "mvbutils"    "networkD3"  
#>  [6] "remotes"     "withr"       "cli"         "gitcreds"    "glue"       
#> [11] "httr2"       "ini"         "jsonlite"    "lifecycle"   "rlang"      
#> [16] "methods"     "utils"       "tools"       "stats"       "graphics"   
#> [21] "htmlwidgets" "igraph"      "grDevices"   "htmltools"   "knitr"      
#> [26] "rmarkdown"   "yaml"        "curl"        "openssl"     "R6"         
#> [31] "rappdirs"    "vctrs"       "Matrix"      "pkgconfig"   "cpp11"      
#> [36] "grid"        "lattice"     "base64enc"   "digest"      "fastmap"    
#> [41] "evaluate"    "highr"       "xfun"        "askpass"     "bslib"      
#> [46] "fontawesome" "jquerylib"   "tinytex"     "sys"         "cachem"     
#> [51] "memoise"     "mime"        "sass"        "fs"

# Oops!

# What are the direct dependencies, without its sub-dependencies?
kwb.package::packageDependencies("kwb.package", recursive = FALSE)
#> $kwb.package
#> [1] "gh"        "kwb.utils" "magrittr"  "mvbutils"  "networkD3" "remotes"  
#> [7] "withr"

By what other (installed) packages a package is used?

For a given package the function packageDependencies() can also find out what other (installed!) packages are depending on it. I am curious, for example which of my packages are depending on the “kwb.utils” package:

kwb.package::packageDependencies("kwb.utils", reverse = TRUE)
#> $kwb.utils
#> [1] "kwb.package"

Quite a lot! Does the recursive argument (TRUE by default) make any difference here?

kwb.package::packageDependencies("kwb.utils", reverse = TRUE, recursive = FALSE)
#> $kwb.utils
#> [1] "kwb.package"

No. Is it the case for other packages, e.g. the “dplyr” package?

kwb.package::packageDependencies("dplyr", reverse = TRUE, recursive = TRUE)
#> $dplyr
#> character(0)
kwb.package::packageDependencies("dplyr", reverse = TRUE, recursive = FALSE)
#> $dplyr
#> NULL

Yes.

How can I visualise package dependencies?

packages <- c("wasserportal", "kwb.dwd")
dependencies <- kwb.package::packageDependencies(packages, recursive = FALSE)
par(mar = c(3, 0, 6, 0), xpd = TRUE)
kwb.package::plotAllDependencies(dependencies, for.each = FALSE)

There are some packages that are used by both, “wasserportal” and “kwb.dwd”.

Which versions of CRAN packages exist?

kwb.package::cranVersions("magrittr")
#>    package version       date     date_type
#> 1 magrittr   1.0.0 2014-02-25 last_modified
#> 2 magrittr   1.0.1 2014-05-15 last_modified
#> 3 magrittr     1.5 2014-11-22 last_modified
#> 4 magrittr   2.0.1 2020-11-17 last_modified
#> 5 magrittr   2.0.2 2022-01-26 last_modified
#> 6 magrittr   2.0.3 2022-03-30     published
#>                                                              package_source_url
#> 1 https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/magrittr/magrittr_1.0.0.tar.gz
#> 2 https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/magrittr/magrittr_1.0.1.tar.gz
#> 3   https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/magrittr/magrittr_1.5.tar.gz
#> 4 https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/magrittr/magrittr_2.0.1.tar.gz
#> 5 https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/magrittr/magrittr_2.0.2.tar.gz
#> 6                  https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/magrittr_2.0.3.tar.gz

Which versions of R packages on GitHub exist?

kwb.package::githubVersions(name = "kwb.utils")
#> Reading KWB-R/kwb.utils
#>      package    version       date author                          remote
#> 1  kwb.utils      0.2.1 2016-09-06 mrustl github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 2  kwb.utils 0.4.0.9000 2018-11-19 hsonne  github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 3  kwb.utils      0.4.4 2019-09-10 mrustl  github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 4  kwb.utils      0.5.0 2019-12-17 hsonne  github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 5  kwb.utils      0.5.1 2020-04-29 hsonne  github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 6  kwb.utils      0.6.0 2020-06-02 hsonne  github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 7  kwb.utils      0.7.0 2020-07-31 hsonne  github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 8  kwb.utils      0.8.0 2021-02-19 hsonne  github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 9  kwb.utils     0.10.0 2022-01-19 hsonne github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 10 kwb.utils     0.11.0 2022-01-24 hsonne github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 11 kwb.utils     0.12.0 2022-05-28 hsonne github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 12 kwb.utils     0.13.0 2023-04-15 hsonne github::KWB-R/[email protected]
#> 13 kwb.utils     0.15.0 2024-03-28 hsonne github::KWB-R/[email protected]

What licences are specified for (installed) packages?

kwb.package::getPackageLicences(kwb.package::systemPackages())