How do I freeze the RSPM in RStudio Cloud?

[zkamvar]

I'm in a situation where I want to demonstrate a package on RStudio Cloud, but one of the upstream dependencies (textshaping) has just updated on CRAN, which means that the binaries are not available from the RSPM. The problem is that the dependency requires external C libraries to compile that RStudio Cloud does not have.

From my understanding, the RStudio Package Manager provides these binaries, from the past, but I cannot seem to figure out how to set it up in RStudio Cloud so that I install that particular package from a date in the past (when it would ideally have been in binary format).

[mingb]

Hi zkamvar,

You might find some of the options detailed in this article useful https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/219949047-Installing-older-versions-of-packages

Best,
Ming

[zkamvar]

Thank you for the quick response! Unfortunately, this does not solve my problem since I am working on the RStudio Cloud and can not configure the required C libraries to install the package from source (which is why I want to use the RSPM, which has binaries available for Ubuntu).

[mingb]

Hi zkamvar,

OK I see what you mean. I was able to install a specific version from RSPM via this method:

install.packages("devtools")
require("devtools")
options(repos = c((CRAN = "https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/all/__linux__/xenial/latest")))
install_version("textshaping", version = "0.2.1")

I hope that works for you

Best,
Ming

[zkamvar]

Thank you! This works!