How can I install a R package on a offline Debian machine?

Question

I have an Debian VM which is not connected to internet. Yet, I can still scp any file from my local machine which does have internet connection. To provide a little bit context,

Answer 1

You are in a pickle. The R package mechanism expects you to be connected to get dependencies. That said, you can get some help:

R> AP <- available.packages(contrib.url(options("repos")$repos[1]))
R> revs <- tools::package_dependencies("shiny", AP, recursive=TRUE)[[1]]
R> revs
 [1] "methods"   "utils"     "httpuv"    "mime"     
 [5] "jsonlite"  "xtable"    "digest"    "htmltools"
 [9] "R6"        "Rcpp"      "tools"     "stats"    
R> 

You can now look into AP again and feed this into download.packages().

Also, several (all ?) of these are in a newer Debian distro so you could use apt-get in download-mode (maybe using apt-offline as suggested in the other question).

Lastly, we do offer a Docker container for shiny so if you use that on your VM you don't need anything else.