Load Multiple Packages at Once in R (Example)

In this tutorial, I’ll illustrate how to load several add-on packages with one line of code in the R programming language.

The article consists of these content blocks:

• Creation of Example Data
• Example: Load Multiple Packages at Once in R
• Video, Further Resources & Summary

Let’s dive right in.

Creation of Example Data

As a first step, we need to specify a vector of package names:

my_packages <- c("dplyr", "mice", "stringr")           # Create vector of packages

We have stored the names of three packages in the character vector my_packages. In the next step, I’ll show how to load all of these packages at once…

Example: Load Multiple Packages at Once in R

If we want to load multiple packages at once to R, we can use a combination of the lapply() and require() functions:

lapply(my_packages, require, character.only = TRUE)    # Load multiple packages

After running the previous R code, all packages in the vector my_packages are loaded to R.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

I have recently released a video on my YouTube channel, which shows the topics of this article. You can find the video below.

Furthermore, you may want to read the other posts of this homepage:

• Check if Package is Missing and Install Automatically
• Unload Package without Restarting R
• Introduction to the pacman Package in R
• Useful R Packages
• The R Programming Language

Summary: In this article you learned how to load a list of packages to RStudio. Please let me know in the comments below, in case you have further questions.