showpackage is an R package for quickly showing package information like
pip show does for
Python. It is not a package manager like miniCRAN,
jetpack,
packrat or any of those packages,
and is not intended to be.
remotes::install_github("robertmyles/showpackage")showpackage is designed for when you need to check package information
quickly, from inside R or from the command line. You can use it inside R
like any regular package, to use it at the command line, run
showpackage::cli() first.
Imagine you are installing R on a server without internet access and need to document package dependencies to maintain the outward tranquility of your lovely DevOps team members. With showpackage, it’s easy. For example, we may want to double-check that data.table has no external dependencies. From the terminal on Mac, for example:
showpackage data.tableThe result is:
$ showpackage data.table
Package: data.table
Version: 1.12.8
Depends: R (>= 3.1.0)
Imports: methods
LinkingTo: None
Description: Fast aggregation of large data (e.g. 100GB in RAM), fast ordered joins, fast add/modify/delete of columns by group using no copies at all, list columns, friendly and fast character-separated-value read/write. Offers a natural and flexible syntax, for faster development.
Maintainer: Matt Dowle
Maintainer Email: mattjdowle@gmail.com
Homepage: http://r-datatable.com, https://Rdatatable.gitlab.io/data.table,
https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table
Required by: splitstackshape
Location: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.6/Resources/library/data.table
Since R is not an external dependency, and neither is methods, we can see that we were right about data.table.
You can also see that a package I’m using, splitstackshape, relies on data.table. showpackage allows us to see how many of our installed packages depend on a certain package. Let’s see how it is for Rcpp:
$ showpackage Rcpp
Package: Rcpp
Version: 1.0.3
Depends: R (>= 3.0.0)
Imports: methods, utils
LinkingTo: None
Description: The 'Rcpp' package provides R functions as well as C++ classes which
offer a seamless integration of R and C++. Many R data types and objects can be
mapped back and forth to C++ equivalents which facilitates both writing of new
code as well as easier integration of third-party libraries. Documentation
about 'Rcpp' is provided by several vignettes included in this package, via the
'Rcpp Gallery' site at <http://gallery.rcpp.org>, the paper by Eddelbuettel and
Francois (2011, <doi:10.18637/jss.v040.i08>), the book by Eddelbuettel (2013,
<doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-6868-4>) and the paper by Eddelbuettel and Balamuta (2018,
<doi:10.1080/00031305.2017.1375990>); see 'citation("Rcpp")' for details.
Maintainer: Dirk Eddelbuettel
Maintainer Email: edd@debian.org
Homepage: http://www.rcpp.org, http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rcpp.html,
https://github.com/RcppCore/Rcpp
Required by: anytime, bindrcpp, dplyr, fs, ggrepel, haven, htmltools, httpuv, hunspell, isoband, later, lubridate, magick, pander, plyr, promises, readr, readxl, reshape2, reticulate, roxygen2, sf, strex, tidyr, units, xml2
Location: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.6/Resources/library/Rcpp
The Required-by field shows us that quite a lot of the packages I’ve
installed utilise Rcpp.
showpackage can be used from inside R too, which gives you the option of saving this info as a dataframe, should you want to. An example of both options:
show_pkg("ggplot2", return_value = "data") %>%
as_tibble() # just for pretty printing
#> # A tibble: 1 x 9
#> Package Version Depends Imports LinkingTo URL Description Maintainer
#> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 ggplot2 3.3.0.… R (>= … "diges… <NA> http… "A system … "Hadley W…
#> # … with 1 more variable: MaintainerEmail <chr>Or:
show_pkg("ggplot2")
#> Package: ggplot2
#> Version: 3.3.0.9000
#> Depends: R (>= 3.2)
#> Imports: digest, glue, grDevices, grid, gtable (>= 0.1.1), isoband, MASS, mgcv,
#> rlang (>= 0.3.0), scales (>= 0.5.0), stats, tibble, withr (>= 2.0.0)
#> LinkingTo: None
#> Description: A system for 'declaratively' creating graphics,
#> based on "The Grammar of Graphics". You provide the data, tell 'ggplot2'
#> how to map variables to aesthetics, what graphical primitives to use,
#> and it takes care of the details.
#> Maintainer: Hadley Wickham
#> Maintainer Email: hadley@rstudio.com
#> Homepage: http://ggplot2.tidyverse.org, https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2
#> Required by: cowplot, crosstalk, fabletools, feasts, ggfiserv, patchwork, tidyverse, ggrepel
#> Location: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.6/Resources/library/ggplot2Python’s pip show is really useful for quickly getting information for
a particular package. R has a few tools for getting information on
packages: installed.packages(); tools::dependsOnPkgs();
packageVersion(); tools::package_dependencies() as well as the
package manager packages mentioned above; it also has great
tools for plotting
networks
of the dependencies between packages. All wonderful tools, but nothing
that does exactly what pip show does, which is something I really like
and appreciated when I needed it for getting Python package
dependencies. Here’s a comparison of pip show and showpackage:
pip show pandas does:
Name: pandas
Version: 0.24.2
Summary: Powerful data structures for data analysis, time series, and statistics
Home-page: http://pandas.pydata.org
Author: None
Author-email: None
License: BSD
Location: /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages
Requires: numpy, python-dateutil, pytzshowpackage zoo does:
Package: zoo
Version: 1.8-6
Depends: R (>= 3.1.0), stats
Imports: utils, graphics, grDevices, lattice (>= 0.20-27)
LinkingTo: None
Description: An S3 class with methods for totally ordered indexed
observations. It is particularly aimed at irregular time series
of numeric vectors/matrices and factors. zoo's key design goals
are independence of a particular index/date/time class and
consistency with ts and base R by providing methods to extend
standard generics.
Maintainer: Achim Zeileis
Maintainer Email: Achim.Zeileis@R-project.org
Homepage: http://zoo.R-Forge.R-project.org/
Required by: CausalImpact, dygraphs, forecast, tseries, TTR, bsts, lmtest, quantmod, xts
Location: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.6/Resources/library/zooBig thanks to Andrew Kane, who made jetpack. I followed similar logic to get a command line interface for showpackage.