Our Trusted Research Environment (TRE) currently offers a partial mirror of CRAN - this includes many of the most frequently used packages, such as odbc, DBI, tidyverse, etc. These can be installed to your workspace by yourself without HIC support getting involved. However, package approval is a manual process, so if there’s something missing, please let us know so we can ingress this into our TRE.
⬇ Installation
Assuming a package has been approved and ingressed into our Cloud TRE CRAN mirror, you should be able to install a package in the usual way, using the RStudio GUI. Alternatively, you can use the install.packages(...) command. E.g., to install tidyverse,
>>> install.packages('tidyverse')
We mirror binary packages for Windows workspaces. However, these aren’t available (other than in deb format) for Linux workspaces. Installation from Ubuntu / Linux workspaces takes a while, since the packages must be compiled.
RTools is installed on all workspaces, which allows for installation from source or installation of packages which include native code.
We are in the process of updating our CRAN mirror which will allow ingress of any CRAN package without manual approval.
😭 Requesting package approval
If a the R package you need isn’t found in our CRAN mirror, please request it by opening a support ticket. This is usually quite a fast process. If possible, please specify your project number / name, whether you are using a Windows or Ubuntu workspace, the name of the package(s) required, as well as any version numbers.