We’re please to announce the first CRAN release of pacman v. 0.2.0. pacman is the combined work of Dason Kurkiewicz & Tyler Rinker.

pacman is an R package management tool that combines the functionality of base library related functions into intuitively named functions. This package is ideally added to .Rprofile to increase workflow by reducing time recalling obscurely named functions, reducing code and integrating functionality of base functions to simultaneously perform multiple actions.

Installing pacman

install.packages("pacman")

## May need the following if binaries haven't been built yet:
install.packages("pacman", type="source")

## Or install from GitHub via devtools:
devtools::install_github("trinker/pacman")

As this is the first release we expect that there are kinks that need to be worked out. We appreciate pull requests and issue reports .

Examples

Here are some of the functionalities the pacman authors tend to use most often:

Installing and Loading

p_load is a general use tool that can install, load, and update packages. For example, many blog posts begin coding with this sort of package call:

packs <- c("XML", "devtools", "RCurl", "fakePackage", "SPSSemulate")
success <- suppressWarnings(sapply(packs, require, character.only = TRUE))
install.packages(names(success)[!success])
sapply(names(success)[!success], require, character.only = TRUE)

With pacman this call can be reduced to:

pacman::p_load(XML, devtools, RCurl, fakePackage, SPSSemulate)

Installing Temporarily

p_temp enables the user to temporarily install a package. This allows a session-only install for testing out a single package without muddying the user’s library.

p_temp(aprof)

Package Functions & Data

p_functions (aka p_funs) and p_data enables the user to see the functions or data sets available in an add-on package.

p_functions(pacman)
p_funs(pacman, all=TRUE)
p_data(lattice)

Vignettes

Check out pacman’s vignettes:

• HTML Vignette: Introduction to pacman
• pacman Functions: Quick Reference