Package built from source to a PC with no internet connection

[jpanfil]

Goal: get a specific version of XGBoost onto a computer with no internet, and installable via renv. This is a bit of an edge case so I understand if there's no current solution. I have built XGBoost v.2.0.3.1 from source following their directions . Thus, I have a library folder with xgboost installed there. It was built rather than installed manually because building from source results in a package around 7MB instead of the ~130MB version that results from renv::install("https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/xgboost-nightly-builds/release_2.0.0/xgboost_r_gpu_win64_82d846bbeb83c652a0b1dff0e3519e67569c4a3d.tar.gz") (link comes from here).

What can I do so that I could copy this XGBoost version to the other PC that has no internet, and be able to run renv::restore or install for new projects there?

I have attempted zipping the xgboost folder into .zip archive, copying that to my cellar, and running

renv::install(r"[path\to\xgboost.zip]")
renv::install("[email protected]")
renv::install("[email protected]")
# all return
Warning: failed to find binary for 'xgboost 2.0.3.1' in package repositories
Warning: failed to find source for 'xgboost 2.0.3.1' in package repositories
Error: failed to retrieve package '[email protected]'

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.4.0 (2024-04-24 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
Running under: Windows Server 2022 x64 (build 20348)

Matrix products: default


locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.utf8  LC_CTYPE=English_United States.utf8    LC_MONETARY=English_United States.utf8
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                           LC_TIME=English_United States.utf8    

time zone: America/Chicago
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices datasets  utils     methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.4.0 tools_4.4.0    renv_0.17.3  

As always, thank you!

[kevinushey]

When installing packages from local files, you normally need to provide the full normalized path to that file -- otherwise renv can misinterpret the request to install the package as being (for example) from a GitHub remote.

The following seems to work on my Windows machine:

# download xgboost nightly binary
setwd(tempdir())
url <- "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/xgboost-nightly-builds/release_2.0.0/xgboost_r_gpu_win64_82d846bbeb83c652a0b1dff0e3519e67569c4a3d.tar.gz"
download.file(url, destfile = basename(url))

# make sure path to local zipfile is normalized
path <- normalizePath(basename(url))

# install from that path
renv::install(path)

Does that help in your scenario?

[jpanfil]

When installing packages from local files, you normally need to provide the full normalized path to that file -- otherwise renv can misinterpret the request to install the package as being (for example) from a GitHub remote.

Sorry, when anonymizing the path, I didn't make it clear that I was using a full normalized path "C:\blah\blah..."

The following seems to work on my Windows machine:
Does that help in your scenario?

This is an option, but as I mentioned above, the library is 130MB when using that tar compared to the 7MB the library is when built from source. So I was hoping to find a way to get the 7MB library easily portable across machines.

I also just tried archiving the folder to a tar.gz (via 7zip) and received a different error:

> renv::install(r"[C:\Users\user\Documents\xgboost_test\xgboost_2.0.3.1.tar.gz]")
Installing xgboost [2.0.3.1] ...
	FAILED
Error installing package 'xgboost':
===================================

* installing *binary* package 'xgboost' ...
cp: unknown option -- )
Try '/usr/bin/cp --help' for more information.
ERROR: installing binary package failed
* removing 'C:/Users/user/Documents/R_experiments/renv_test/renv/staging/1/xgboost'
Error: install of package 'xgboost' failed [error code 1]