Installing older version of R package
Pure install.packages method
See this thread on the r-devel mailing list. In reply to Kurt Wheeler, Kurt Hornik reveals an undocumented feature of the CRAN website to specify the specific version of a package.
This method will work as long as you have all required dependencies already installed:
package = "https://cran.r-project.org/package=svglite&version=1.2.1"
utils::install.packages(pkgs = package, repos = NULL)
Note the URL structure above. This addresses the issue that CRAN has a different URL structure for the latest version than for archived versions:
# Latest version (not available at Archive/svglite)
https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/svglite_1.2.1.tar.gz
# Archived version
https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/svglite/svglite_1.2.0.tar.gz
remotes::install_version method
Another option is to use the remotes::install_version function. However, you will need to install the remotes package.
You can download your appropriate version from the link below as a zip file.
http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/ggplot2/
In R Studio: Tools >> Install packages >> Install from: (select drop down)
Package Archive File(.zip, .tar.gz).
Choose your newly-downloaded-package-zip-file and install the package
The remotes package offers an install_version function that can do this directly.
require(remotes)
install_version("ggplot2", version = "0.9.1", repos = "http://cran.us.r-project.org")
Previously, this answer pointed to the devtools package, which also re-exports the install_version function. Thanks @MichaelChirico for pointing out that the remotes package is preferable.
To install an older version of a package from source (within R):
packageurl <- "http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/ggplot2/ggplot2_0.9.1.tar.gz"
install.packages(packageurl, repos=NULL, type="source")
If this doesn't work for you and you're on Windows, the reason is probably the lack of an appropriate tool chain for building/compiling packages. Normally you would install a pre-compiled binary from CRAN but they only archive package sources, not binaries.[1] This means you need to install Rtools so that you can compile everything locally. (Note: Rtools is not an R package.)
@shadow's answer below also makes the case that you can use devtools::install_version(). That's also a good idea, but is also subject to needing Rtools on Windows.
As of September 18, 2015, a new package versions has appeared on CRAN. This relies on the Revolution Analytics MRAN server to install packages for specific versions or dates:
# install yesterday's version of checkpoint, by date
install.dates('checkpoint', Sys.Date() - 1)
# install earlier versions of checkpoint and devtools
install.versions(c('checkpoint', 'devtools'), c('0.3.3', '1.6.1'))
That has the advantage of not requiring Rtools to install binary packages on Windows, but only works going back to 2014-09-17 (when MRAN was launched).
To install an older version from the command line (outside of R):
You can also install a package by using R CMD INSTALL on the command line (Terminal, Command Prompt, etc.) once you have the package source ("tarball") locally on your machine, for example using wget (if you have it):
wget http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/ggplot2/ggplot2_0.9.1.tar.gz
or, if you're on Windows, an equivalent using PowerShell would be:
(new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/ggplot2/ggplot2_0.9.1.tar.gz", "./ggplot2_0.9.1.tar.gz")
or you can just download the source from the CRAN archive via your web browser.
To install from the local file, you can just do:
R CMD INSTALL ggplot2_0.9.1.tar.gz
That should work on any platform (with the same caveat - as above - about needing a tool chain for building packages).
[1]This is no longer entirely true. From March 2016, CRAN has started hosting a "CRAN Archive" server that contains Windows and Mac binaries for very old versions of R (> 5 years old). You can now install directly from this server using install.packages(). See new R FAQ 7.44 for some details.