Transferring installed R packages to R on another computer

Question

I have R installed on one linux computer where there are number of packages installed. Now I am setting up R on another linux computer. Installing R is easy from their repository but I will have to install many packages using

install.packages("pkgname") 

which will involve repeat downloading as well. Is there any way I can copy all the installed packages from first computer to the second one? Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I would recommend against this approach. Some of those packages will have been installed from source which includes compile-time checks based on what is installed on "computer one" and that will not necessarily be true on the other computer.

You have two basic choices

1. Use binary package (ie r-cran-pkgname for various packages). These will work but a) not all of CRAN exists that way and b) they may lag the current release.
2. Install from source. Just run saveRDS(installed.packages(), file="/tmp/pkgs.rds") on the first computer and pkgs <- readRDS("/tmp/pkgs.rds"); install.packages(rownames(pkgs)) on the second after transfering the file.