R install packages from Shell

You may find littler useful. It is a command-line front-end / variant of R (which uses the R-embedding interface).

I use the install.r script all the time to install package from the shell. There is a second variant with more command-line argument parsing but it has an added dependency.

tl;dr

Rscript -e 'install.packages("drat", repos="https://cloud.r-project.org")'

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You mentioned you are trying to install dplyr into custom lib location on your disk. Be aware that dplyr package does not support that. You can read more in dplyr#4641.

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Moreover if you are installing private package published in internal CRAN-like repository (created by drat or tools::write_PACKAGES), you can easily combine repos argument and resolve dependencies from CRAN automatically.

Rscript -e 'install.packages("priv.pkg", repos=c("cran.priv","https://cloud.r-project.org"))'

This is very handy feature of R repositories, although for production use I would recommend to cache packages from CRAN locally, and use those, so you will never be surprised by a breaking changes in your dependencies. For quality information about handling R in production I suggest to look into talk by Wit Jakuczun at WhyR2019 How to make R great for machine learning in (not only) Enterprise: slides, video.