I recently took the plunge to upgrade R to 2.15. As I was pondering the best way to install all my favorite packages, I stumbled upon this very helpful post from HLPlab
The post describes a very handy way of ensuring that all your favorite packages make it to your new install. Basically this is done via a handy set of code, and involves: 1) saving the names of your packages to a location, and then 2) calling R to then install those packages by name into your new version.
The code with descriptions can be found below:
1. Run the script “store_packages.R” in your current version of R.
# store_packages.R # # stores a list of your currently installed packages tmp = installed.packages() installedpackages = as.vector(tmp[is.na(tmp[,"Priority"]), "Package"]) save(installedpackages, file="packagenames.rda")
Make sure that all the quotation marks in the script are straight. The scripts will generate an error if they include any curly quotation marks. For some reason, when I saved this blog entry, some quotation marks changed to curly ones. WordPress is probably to blame for this problem, which I have not been able to fix.)
2. Close R. Open the installation of R that you want the packages to be installed in.
3. Run the script “restore_packages.R”.
# restore_packages.R # # installs each package from the stored list of packages load(“~/packagenames.rda”) for (count in 1:length(installedpackages)) install.packages(installedpackages[count])
Note that if you want to install the list of packages in an installation of R on a different computer, you should transfer the .rda file that is created by the store_packages script to that computer, and make sure that the path for the “load” command in the restore_packages script is set to the right location.
However, for me, this all may change with my next upgrade–perhaps, as I chose the option to save my packages to a personal library (when 2.15 gave me the option) and my packages are now stored in a different location:
The downloaded binary packages are in
C:\Users\Chris\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpiCX9N6\downloaded_packages
failuretoconverge 
Hi, thanks for spreading the word. The post was by Anne Pier Salverda, who kindly put this code together.
Many, many thanks to Anne!!! She certainly saved me from much unneeded drudgery!!! 🙂
As an example (just recently re-upgraded), here is what my current installedpackages vector looks like:
c(“bibtex”, “bitops”, “brew”, “car”, “caTools”, “coin”, “colorspace”,
“compare”, “data.table”, “devtools”, “dichromat”, “digest”, “directlabels”,
“doBy”, “evaluate”, “expsmooth”, “fastmatch”, “fields”, “fma”,
“forecast”, “formatR”, “fpp”, “fracdiff”, “gdata”, “ggmap”, “ggplot2”,
“gmodels”, “googleVis”, “gplots”, “gRain”, “gRbase”, “gridExtra”,
“gtable”, “gtools”, “Hmisc”, “httr”, “igraph”, “knitcitations”,
“knitr”, “labeling”, “LearnBayes”, “lmtest”, “mapproj”, “maps”,
“markdown”, “memoise”, “modeest”, “modeltools”, “multcomp”, “munsell”,
“mvtnorm”, “odfWeave”, “party”, “PerformanceAnalytics”, “plyr”,
“png”, “proto”, “psych”, “quadprog”, “R.devices”, “R.methodsS3”,
“R.oo”, “R.rsp”, “R.utils”, “R2HTML”, “R2PPT”, “RColorBrewer”,
“rcom”, “Rcpp”, “RcppArmadillo”, “RcppEigen”, “RCurl”, “reports”,
“reshape2”, “RgoogleMaps”, “rJava”, “rjson”, “RJSONIO”, “rms”,
“RODBC”, “rscproxy”, “sandwich”, “scales”, “snow”, “spam”, “stargazer”,
“stringr”, “strucchange”, “timeDate”, “timeSeries”, “triangle”,
“tseries”, “vcd”, “whisker”, “XLConnect”, “XLConnectJars”, “xlsReadWrite”,
“XML”, “xtable”, “xts”, “zoo”, “manipulate”, “rstudio”)