R package dplyr reinstall every instance

Question

Whenever I restart R and want to use any functions from dplyr I get an error:

Error in (function (classes, fdef, mtable) : unable to find an inherited method for function ‘mutate’ for signature ‘"data.frame"’

I can delete the dplyr folder in the library and then reinstall the package and then it will work.

Anyone know whats going on here?

Answer 1

In R, there are two steps of using a package.  The one-time install (e.g. install.packages("dplyr"), and the once-per-fresh-session "load" which is done using library(dplyr). It seems like the step you are taking to reinstall the package is doing both of these, but the typical workflow is to load the packages you need at the start of a script. No reinstall should be necessary.