Update all packages from GitHub

Question

I know you can install packages from CRAN with this syntax:

install.packages(c(\"Rcpp\"), dependencies=TRUE)

You can update all of them from CR

Answer 1

This works for me. It goes through all of the packages in your library, not only loaded packages.

update_github_pkgs <- function() {

  # check/load necessary packages
  # devtools package
  if (!("package:devtools" %in% search())) {
    tryCatch(require(devtools), error = function(x) {warning(x); cat("Cannot load devtools package \n")})
    on.exit(detach("package:devtools", unload=TRUE))
  }

  pkgs <- installed.packages(fields = "RemoteType")
  github_pkgs <- pkgs[pkgs[, "RemoteType"] %in% "github", "Package"]

  print(github_pkgs)
  lapply(github_pkgs, function(pac) {
    message("Updating ", pac, " from GitHub...")

    repo = packageDescription(pac, fields = "GithubRepo")
    username = packageDescription(pac, fields = "GithubUsername")

    install_github(repo = paste0(username, "/", repo))
  })
}