Installing older version of R package

Question

I am trying to use Rpy2 and ggplot2 but I get an error. After some searching for the error online, I found that the error occurs because there are changes in the ggplot2 package that are not yet reflected in Rpy2 (for example, see this post (Edit: Link is now dead)).

So I now need to install an older version of ggplot2. Here is pseudo-code for what I want:

install.packages("ggplot2", version='0.9.1')

But install.packages does not have a version argument. How do I do it?

Answer 1

To install an older version of a package from source (within R):

packageurl <- "http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/ggplot2/ggplot2_0.9.1.tar.gz"
install.packages(packageurl, repos=NULL, type="source")

If this doesn't work for you and you're on Windows, the reason is probably the lack of an appropriate tool chain for building/compiling packages. Normally you would install a pre-compiled binary from CRAN but they only archive package sources, not binaries.^[1] This means you need to install Rtools so that you can compile everything locally. (Note: Rtools is not an R package.)

@shadow's answer below also makes the case that you can use devtools::install_version(). That's also a good idea, but is also subject to needing Rtools on Windows.

As of September 18, 2015, a new package versions has appeared on CRAN. This relies on the Revolution Analytics MRAN server to install packages for specific versions or dates:

# install yesterday's version of checkpoint, by date
install.dates('checkpoint', Sys.Date() - 1)

# install earlier versions of checkpoint and devtools
install.versions(c('checkpoint', 'devtools'), c('0.3.3', '1.6.1'))

That has the advantage of not requiring Rtools to install binary packages on Windows, but only works going back to 2014-09-17 (when MRAN was launched).

To install an older version from the command line (outside of R):

You can also install a package by using R CMD INSTALL on the command line (Terminal, Command Prompt, etc.) once you have the package source ("tarball") locally on your machine, for example using wget (if you have it):

wget http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/ggplot2/ggplot2_0.9.1.tar.gz

or, if you're on Windows, an equivalent using PowerShell would be:

(new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/ggplot2/ggplot2_0.9.1.tar.gz", "./ggplot2_0.9.1.tar.gz")

or you can just download the source from the CRAN archive via your web browser.

To install from the local file, you can just do:

R CMD INSTALL ggplot2_0.9.1.tar.gz

That should work on any platform (with the same caveat - as above - about needing a tool chain for building packages).

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^[1]_{This is no longer entirely true. From March 2016, CRAN has started hosting a "CRAN Archive" server that contains Windows and Mac binaries for very old versions of R (> 5 years old). You can now install directly from this server using install.packages(). See new R FAQ 7.44 for some details.}