How to find out which package version is loaded in R?

Question

I am in a process of figuring out how to use my university cluster. It has 2 versions of R installed. System wide R 2.11 (Debian 6.0) and R 2.14.2 in non-standard location.

I am trying to use MPI together with snow. The code I am trying to run is the following

library(snow)
library(Rmpi)
cl <- makeMPIcluster(mpi.universe.size()-1)
stopCluster(cl)
mpi.quit()

It works without the problems on R 2.11. (I launch the script with mpirun -H localhost,n1,n2,n3,n4 -n 1 R --slave -f code.R). Now when I try to do it with R 2.14.2, I get the following message:

Error: This is R 2.11.1, package 'snow' needs >= 2.12.1
In addition: Warning message:

So it seems that R loads the package snow version compiled for R 2.11. I've installed snow under R 2.14 into my home folder and I added the following lines to my code:

.libPaths("/soft/R/lib/R/library")
.libPaths("~/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.11")
print(.libPaths())
print(sessionInfo())
print(version)

And the output before the error confirms that I am indeed running R 2.14.2 and my R packages folder is first in search path. But I still get the error.

So my question is how do I determine which version of package is loaded in R? I can see with installed.packages all the packages which are installed, so maybe there is some function which lists similar information for loaded packages?

Solution 1

You can use sessionInfo() to accomplish that.

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C               LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8    LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C             LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

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

other attached packages:
[1] ggplot2_0.9.0  reshape2_1.2.1 plyr_1.7.1    

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] colorspace_1.1-1   dichromat_1.2-4    digest_0.5.2       MASS_7.3-18        memoise_0.1        munsell_0.3       
 [7] proto_0.3-9.2      RColorBrewer_1.0-5 scales_0.2.0       stringr_0.6       
> 

However, as per comments and the answer below, there are better options

> packageVersion("snow")

[1] ‘0.3.9’

Or:

"Rmpi" %in% loadedNamespaces()

Solution 2

You can use utils::packageVersion to see what version of a package is installed:

> packageVersion("snow")
[1] ‘0.3.9’

Note that

A package will not be ‘found’ unless it has a DESCRIPTION file which contains a valid Version field. Different warnings are given when no package directory is found and when there is a suitable directory but no valid DESCRIPTION file.

Although it sounds like you want to see what version of R you are running, in which case @Justin's sessionInfo suggestion is the way to go.

Solution 3

Technically speaking, all of the answers at this time are wrong. packageVersion does not return the version of the loaded package. It goes to the disk, and fetches the package version from there.

This will not make a difference in most cases, but sometimes it does. As far as I can tell, the only way to get the version of a loaded package is the rather hackish:

asNamespace(pkg)$`.__NAMESPACE__.`$spec[["version"]]

where pkg is the package name.

EDIT: I am not sure when this function was added, but you can also use getNamespaceVersion, this is cleaner:

getNamespaceVersion(pkg)

Solution 4

To check the version of R execute : R --version

Or after you are in the R shell print the contents of version$version.string

EDIT

To check the version of installed packages do the following.

After loading the library, you can execute sessionInfo ()

But to know the list of all installed packages:

packinfo <- installed.packages(fields = c("Package", "Version"))
packinfo[,c("Package", "Version")]

OR to extract a specific library version, once you have extracted the information using the installed.package function as above just use the name of the package in the first dimension of the matrix.

packinfo["RANN",c("Package", "Version")]
packinfo["graphics",c("Package", "Version")]

The above will print the versions of the RANN library and the graphics library.

Solution 5

You can try something like this:

1. package_version(R.version)

2. getRversion()

View more solutions

Comments

[mpiktas]

The question was about package version, not R version. And if look at my code, I use version.

[mpiktas]

Thanks. My mistake was to output sessionInfo before the package loading. In the end it turned out that the correct version of package was loaded, but R still complained about the old version. Installed my own local version of R and everything worked like a charm.

[Louis Maddox]

TMI! packageVersion() is much better in most cases

[RockScience]

I would not advise to use sessionInfo. See the Note of ?sessionInfo: "The information on ‘loaded’ packages and namespaces is the current version installed at the location the package was loaded from: it can be wrong if another process has been changing packages during the session." So: if you want to know wether the package is loaded or not, better use "Rmpi" %in% loadedNamespaces() ; if you want to know which version is installed in a specific location, better use packageVersion(lib.loc = ...)

[seasmith]

`:::`(pkg, .__NAMESPACE__.)$spec[["version"]] is a synonym of the asNamespace() method of getting the package version.

[calico_]

This answer is so important. packageVersion() only shows you the top result in installed.packages() but if you have multiple version of the same package, and you load one specifically, it won't give you the right answer.

[mpiktas]

Yes, but sessionInfo gives the version number too. In my case the latter is usually more important.

[Marmite Bomber]

packinfo[, "Version", drop=F] gives even more pretty result (package name is not duplicated).

[krlmlr]

Per hughjonesd.shinyapps.io/rcheology it's been available since available as early as R 1.7.0.

[krlmlr]

See Gábor's answer below for an answer that returns the version of a currently loaded package (which may be different from the on-disk version): stackoverflow.com/a/37369263/946850

[dpprdan]

It seems that packageVersion does return the version of the loaded package by default. The docs for the lib.loc argument read: "The default value of NULL corresponds to all libraries currently known. If the default is used, the loaded packages and namespaces are searched before the libraries." Emphasis mine.

[Dan Chaltiel]

This answer clearly wins for me as you can use it to write neat conditions. See my answer below for an example.

[Salim B]

There's a convenience function utils::packageVersion() that directly parses the Version field, see stackoverflow.com/a/11103291/7196903