How to unload a package without restarting R

Question

I d like to unload a package without having to restart R  mostly because restarting R as I try out different  conflicting packages is getting frustrating  but conceivably this could be used in a program to use one function and then another--although namespace referencing is probably a better idea for that use     library doesn t show any options that would unload a package   There is a suggestion that detach can unload package  but the following both fail   detach vegan       Error in detach vegan    invalid name argument   detach  vegan        Error in detach  vegan     invalid name argument   So how do I unload a package

User · Answer

Just go to OUTPUT window  then click on Packages icon  it is located between Plot and Help icons   Remove  tick   check mark  from the package you wanted be unload   For again using the package just put a  tick or Check mark  in front of package or use    library  lme4

User · Answer

You can uncheck the checkbox button in RStudio  packages

User · Answer

You can also use the unloadNamespace command  as in   unloadNamespace  sqldf     The function detaches the namespace prior to unloading it

User · Answer

detach package PackageName  works and there is no need to use quotes

User · Answer

Another option is   devtools  unload  your-package     This apparently also deals with the issue of registered S3 methods that are not removed with unloadNamespace

User · Answer

You can try all you want to remove a package  and all the dependencies it brought in alongside  using unloadNamespace   but the memory footprint will still persist  And no  detach  package  packageName   unload TRUE  force   TRUE  will not work either   From a fresh new console or Session  gt  Restart R check memory with the pryr package   pryr  mem used      40 6 MB      This will depend on which packages are loaded obviously  can also fluctuate a bit after the decimal    Check my sessionInfo    R version 3 6 1  2019-07-05  Platform  x86 64-w64-mingw32 x64  64-bit  Running under  Windows 10 x64  build 17763   Matrix products  default  locale   1  LC COLLATE English Canada 1252  LC CTYPE English Canada 1252    LC MONETARY English Canada 1252 LC NUMERIC C                     5  LC TIME English Canada 1252      attached base packages   1  stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base       loaded via a namespace  and not attached    1  compiler 3 6 1   pryr 0 1 4       magrittr 1 5     tools 3 6 1      Rcpp 1 0 3       stringi 1 4 3    codetools 0 2-16 stringr 1 4 0     9  packrat 0 5 0      Let s load the Seurat package and check the new memory footprint   library Seurat  pryr  mem used      172 MB       Likely to change in the future but just to give you an idea   Let s use unloadNamespace   to remove everything   unloadNamespace  Seurat   unloadNamespace  ape   unloadNamespace  cluster   unloadNamespace  cowplot   unloadNamespace  ROCR   unloadNamespace  gplots   unloadNamespace  caTools   unloadNamespace  bitops   unloadNamespace  fitdistrplus   unloadNamespace  RColorBrewer   unloadNamespace  sctransform   unloadNamespace  future apply   unloadNamespace  future   unloadNamespace  plotly   unloadNamespace  ggrepel   unloadNamespace  ggridges   unloadNamespace  ggplot2   unloadNamespace  gridExtra   unloadNamespace  gtable   unloadNamespace  uwot   unloadNamespace  irlba   unloadNamespace  leiden   unloadNamespace  reticulate   unloadNamespace  rsvd   unloadNamespace  survival   unloadNamespace  Matrix   unloadNamespace  nlme   unloadNamespace  lmtest   unloadNamespace  zoo   unloadNamespace  metap   unloadNamespace  lattice   unloadNamespace  grid   unloadNamespace  httr   unloadNamespace  ica   unloadNamespace  igraph   unloadNamespace  irlba   unloadNamespace  KernSmooth   unloadNamespace  leiden   unloadNamespace  MASS   unloadNamespace  pbapply   unloadNamespace  plotly   unloadNamespace  png   unloadNamespace  RANN   unloadNamespace  RcppAnnoy   unloadNamespace  tidyr   unloadNamespace  dplyr   unloadNamespace  tibble   unloadNamespace  RANN   unloadNamespace  tidyselect   unloadNamespace  purrr   unloadNamespace  htmlwidgets   unloadNamespace  htmltools   unloadNamespace  lifecycle   unloadNamespace  pillar   unloadNamespace  vctrs   unloadNamespace  rlang   unloadNamespace  Rtsne   unloadNamespace  SDMTools   unloadNamespace  Rdpack   unloadNamespace  bibtex   unloadNamespace  tsne   unloadNamespace  backports   unloadNamespace  R6   unloadNamespace  lazyeval   unloadNamespace  scales   unloadNamespace  munsell   unloadNamespace  colorspace   unloadNamespace  npsurv   unloadNamespace  compiler   unloadNamespace  digest   unloadNamespace  R utils   unloadNamespace  pkgconfig   unloadNamespace  gbRd   unloadNamespace  parallel   unloadNamespace  gdata   unloadNamespace  listenv   unloadNamespace  crayon   unloadNamespace  splines   unloadNamespace  zeallot   unloadNamespace  reshape   unloadNamespace  glue   unloadNamespace  lsei   unloadNamespace  RcppParallel   unloadNamespace  data table   unloadNamespace  viridisLite   unloadNamespace  globals     Now check sessionInfo     R version 3 6 1  2019-07-05  Platform  x86 64-w64-mingw32 x64  64-bit  Running under  Windows 10 x64  build 17763   Matrix products  default  locale   1  LC COLLATE English Canada 1252  LC CTYPE English Canada 1252    LC MONETARY English Canada 1252 LC NUMERIC C                     5  LC TIME English Canada 1252      attached base packages   1  stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base       loaded via a namespace  and not attached     1  tools 3 6 1       stringr 1 4 0     rstudioapi 0 10   pryr 0 1 4        jsonlite 1 6      gtools 3 8 1      R oo 1 22 0         8  magrittr 1 5      Rcpp 1 0 3        R methodsS3 1 7 1 stringi 1 4 3     plyr 1 8 4        reshape2 1 4 3    codetools 0 2-16   15  packrat 0 5 0     assertthat 0 2 1    Check the memory footprint   pryr  mem used      173 MB   Link to screen-cast demonstration

User · Answer

Try this  see  detach for more details    detach  package vegan   unload TRUE      It is possible to have multiple versions of a package loaded at once  for example  if you have a development version and a stable version in different libraries   To guarantee that all copies are detached  use this function   detach package  lt - function pkg  character only   FALSE      if  character only          pkg  lt - deparse substitute pkg         search item  lt - paste  package   pkg  sep          while search item  in  search            detach search item  unload   TRUE  character only   TRUE          Usage is  for example  detach package vegan    or  detach package  vegan   TRUE

User · Answer

When you are going back and forth between scripts it may only sometimes be necessary to unload a package  Here s a simple IF statement that will prevent warnings that would appear if you tried to unload a package that was not currently loaded   if  package vegan   in  search    detach  package vegan   unload TRUE     Including this at the top of a script might be helpful   I hope that makes your day

User · Answer

Note also that you can only use unload   once  If you use it a second time without rerunning library    y ll get the not very informative error message invalid  name  argument   library vegan    gt  Loading required package  permute   gt  Loading required package  lattice   gt  This is vegan 2 5-6 detach  package vegan    unload TRUE  detach  package vegan    unload TRUE    gt  Error in detach  package vegan   unload   TRUE   invalid  name  argument   Created on 2020-05-09 by the reprex package  v0 3 0

User · Answer

I tried what kohske wrote as an answer and I got error again  so I did some search and found this which worked for me  R 3 0 2    require splines    package detach package splines    or also  library splines  pkg  lt -  package splines  detach pkg  character only   TRUE

User · Answer

I would like to add an alternative solution  This solution does not directly answer your question on unloading a package but  IMHO  provides a cleaner alternative to achieve your desired goal  which I understand  is broadly concerned with avoiding name conflicts and trying different functions  as stated      mostly because restarting R as I try out different  conflicting packages is getting frustrating  but conceivably this could be used in a program to use one function and then another--although namespace referencing is probably a better idea for that use   Solution  Function with package offered via the withr package  offers the possibility to      attache a package to the search path  executes the code  then removes the package from the search path  The package namespace is not unloaded  however     Example  library withr  with package  ggplot2       ggplot mtcars    geom point aes wt  hp        Calling geom point outside withr context  exists  geom point      1  FALSE   geom point used in the example is not accessible from the global namespace  I reckon it may be a cleaner way of handling conflicts than loading and unloading packages

[r] How to unload a package without restarting R

Examples related to r

Examples related to package

Examples related to r-faq