ggplot2 fails to load, with 'rlang' package error

Question

This is the error message:

Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘ggplot2’ in loadNamespace(i, c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[i]]): namespace ‘rlang’ 0.3.4 is already loaded, but >= 0.4.0 is required

In addition to a Warning message:

package ‘ggplot2’ was built under R version 3.6.1

Please help. Thanks a lot.

Solution 1

Just providing a more complete answer for people to follow.

Remove packages with

remove.packages("rlang")

That may not work as you may need to delete the package from your R library. To find where you R library is run

.libPaths()

Once you've deleted the rlang folder from there you can restart R and run

install.packages("https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/rlang/rlang_0.4.9.tar.gz", repo=NULL, type="source") # for specific rlang version, in this case 0.4.9. For latest version can run install.packages("rlang")
packageVersion("rlang") #to check you now have rlang version you want

Solution 2

Figured just a slight modification to the first answer worked best for me: restart R, then:

remove.packages("rlang") remove.packages("dplyr")

install.packages("rlang") install.packages("dplyr")

library(rlang) library(dplyr)

Solution 3

Problem solved by updating the R and Rstudio, removing "rlang" package and reinstalling the package, removing "ggplot2" package and reinstalling the package back.