Packages Pane

The Packages pane, normally located in the bottom-right quadrant of the RStudio UI, can be used to view and manage the R packages you have installed on your system.

The Packages pane. A subset of installed packages is displayed in a table.

Toolbar

The Packages pane includes a number of buttons and widgets in its toolbar for some of the more commonly used package management actions.

Install

The Install button can be used to open a separate modal dialog, which installs R packages.

The modal dialog used to install packages.

After you click Install, RStudio installs the requested packages via an invocation of install.packages() in the RStudio Console.

The R console, showing an invocation of `install.packages("tidyverse")` as well as the console output following its requested installation.

Update

The Update button can be used to check whether any installed packages are currently out-of-date. It also installs up-to-date versions of these packages from your configured R package repositories.

The Update Packages dialog, showing two packages ('broom', 'dplyr') which are out-of-date and can be updated.

When you click Install Updates, RStudio sends an invocation of install.packages() to the Console to install the latest-available versions of the requested packages.

Refresh

The Refresh button can be used to rebuild the Packages table. RStudio normally automatically detects and updates the Packages pane as packages are loaded, installed, and uninstalled. However, it may be necessary to manually refresh the Packages pane in some situations (for example, if a package were installed via a separate instance of R or RStudio).

Packages table

The table within the Packages pane displays information about the currently installed R packages on the system. Each row corresponds to a single package.

Checkbox

The first column within the Packages table is used to load and unload R packages. Clicking a package’s checkbox either loads or unloads that package as appropriate. Use the ? function to run ?library and ?search for more details.

Name

The Name column shows the name of the package. Each name is also a hyperlink that, when clicked, navigates you to the Help index associated with that package.

Description

The Description column shows a short description of the package, giving its main purpose of use.

Source

The Source column shows the source from which this package was retrieved or installed. A package’s source is not always known. To identify the source, RStudio requires the installation tool to record the package’s source at the time of installation. While newer versions of RStudio, and tools like pak, renv, and devtools will normally do this, R packages installed in a “plain” instance of R via install.packages() will not.

Version

The Version column shows the version of the package currently installed.

Buttons

The final column shows a set of buttons:

  1. The document icon links to additional documentation on the package’s use. This is most commonly a pkgdown website maintained by the package author.
  2. The globe icon lets you navigate to the package’s landing page provided by your package repository.
  3. The final X icon can be used to uninstall a package. Clicking the X icon uninstalls the package via a remove.packages() invocation sent to the R console.

Package Manager integration

Starting with RStudio version 2025.09.0, RStudio displays additional information about installed packages when the R session has been configured to use Posit Package Manager. This can be either the Posit Public Package Manager instance or an internal enterprise Package Manager instance.

Vulnerabilites

To keep systems secure, it’s important to keep installed software, like R packages, up-to-date. Posit maintains and provides information on known vulnerabilities in versions of R packages, and Package Manger makes this information available.

When RStudio has been configured to use a Package Manager instance, RStudio will automatically obtain and display this vulnerability information as appropriate.

For example, version 1.6 of the commonmark package has a number of known vulnerabilities. If that version of the package is installed, RStudio displays a small warning icon in the Packages table for that package:

The Packages pane, with the row entry for the 'commonmark' package showing a warning icon, indicating it has known vulnerabilities.

You can hover the mouse cursor over this icon for more information, or click on it to get a more detailed description of the known vulnerabilities.

A dialog shows known vulnerability information for version 1.6 of the 'commonmark' package.

You can page through the list of known vulnerabilities via the Next and Previous buttons. If an update is available, you can also use Update to update the package to a newer version with the vulnerabilities mitigated.

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