Skip to contents

Installing development versions

Source: vignettes/install_nightly.Rmd
install_nightly.Rmd

Users of the arrow package will typically want to use the latest release version of the package, but may occasionally require a development build. Arrow developers are more likely to need the current development version. In this article we describe the process for installing the development version.

Install nightly builds

Development versions of the package (binary and source) are built nightly and hosted at https://nightlies.apache.org/arrow/r/. These nightly package builds are not official Apache releases and are not recommended for production use. They may be useful for testing bug fixes and new features under active development.

To install arrow from there, use the following command:

install.packages("arrow", repos = c(arrow = "https://nightlies.apache.org/arrow/r", getOption("repos")))

Conda users can install arrow nightly builds with:

conda install -c arrow-nightlies -c conda-forge --strict-channel-priority r-arrow

If you already have a version of arrow installed, you can switch to the latest nightly development version as follows:

arrow::install_arrow(nightly = TRUE)

Install from git repository

An alternative way to obtain a development versions is to install the R package from a git checkout. To do so, type the following at the terminal:

git clone https://github.com/apache/arrow
cd arrow/r
R CMD INSTALL .

If you don’t already have libarrow on your system, when installing the R package from source, it will also download and build libarrow for you. See the section above on build environment variables for options for configuring the build source and enabled features.

Further reading