3.2. Using Packages

When using the Renjin Script Engine, R packages are treated almost exactly like any other Java or Scala dependency, and must be placed on your application’s classpath by Maven or a similar build tool.

As a service, BeDataDriven provides a repository with all CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network) and Bioconductor packages at http://packages.renjin.org. The packages in this repository are built and packaged for use with Renjin. Not all packages can (yet) be built for Renjin so please consult the repository to see if your favorite package is available for Renjin.

If you use Maven you can include a package to your project by adding it as a dependency. For example, to include the exptest package you add the following to your project’s pom.xml file (don’t forget to add BeDataDriven’s public repository as described in the section Project Setup):

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.renjin.cran</groupId>
    <artifactId>exptest</artifactId>
    <version>1.2-b214</version>
</dependency>

You will find this information on the package detail page as well. For this example this page is at http://packages.renjin.org/packages/exptest.html. Inside your R code you can now simply attach this package to the search path using the library(exptest) statement.