Where does R store packages?

Thanks for the direction from the above two answerers. James Thompson's suggestion worked best for Windows users.

1. Go to where your R program is installed. This is referred to as R_Home in the literature. Once you find it, go to the /etc subdirectory.

   C:\R\R-2.10.1\etc
   

2. Select the file in this folder named Rprofile.site. I open it with VIM. You will find this is a bare-bones file with less than 20 lines of code. I inserted the following inside the code:

   # my custom library path
   .libPaths("C:/R/library")
   

   (The comment added to keep track of what I did to the file.)

3. In R, typing the .libPaths() function yields the first target at C:/R/Library

NOTE: there is likely more than one way to achieve this, but other methods I tried didn't work for some reason.

The install.packages command looks through the .libPaths variable. Here's what mine defaults to on OSX:

> .libPaths()
[1] "/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/library"

I don't install packages there by default, I prefer to have them installed in my home directory. In my .Rprofile, I have this line:

.libPaths( "/Users/tex/lib/R" )

This adds the directory "/Users/tex/lib/R" to the front of the .libPaths variable.

This is documented in the 'R Installation and Administration' manual that came with your installation.

On my Linux box:

R> .libPaths()
[1] "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "/usr/lib/R/site-library"      
[3] "/usr/lib/R/library"           
R> 

meaning that the default path is the first of these. You can override that via an argument to both install.packages() (from inside R) or R CMD INSTALL (outside R).

You can also override by setting the R_LIBS_USER variable.