Using a local repo that is not available on target machine

[Paul Teehan]

Hello, 

I am trying to figure out the following workflow:

1. Develop project on machine A which has a local repo of custom package.

2. Bundle the project and include sources for CRAN and local packages.

3. Deploy the project on machine B which does NOT have the same local repo.  The intent is that everything that's needed is included in the bundle. 

I have steps 1 and 2 working, which I did by setting the 'repos' option to include my local repo, and adding a "Repository: MyLib" line to the DESCRIPTION file for each package.  When I bundle I set include.lib=TRUE.  It seems that the sources are included, including the local packages.  So far so good.

I then extract the archive on machine B and run R.  The packrat init script runs, and then fails here:

- Restoring project library...

Error in read.dcf(file = tmpf) : cannot open the connection

In addition: Warning messages:

1: In restore(project = getwd(), restart = FALSE) :

  The most recent snapshot was generated using R version 3.1.2

2: In read.dcf(file = tmpf) :

  cannot open compressed file '/path/to/my/local/repo/src/contrib/PACKAGES', probable reason 'No such file or directory'

Naturally it fails, because that path doesn't exist on this machine.  But I had thought it wouldn't need access to the local repo, since the sources are included in the archive.   Have I misunderstood something fundamental about how packrat works?  Is there a way to do what I want?  

Thanks