GitHub - csgillespie/drat: Drat R Archive Template (original) (raw)

Drat R Archive Template

Background

The R package ecosystem is one of the cornerstones of the success seen by R. As of early 2016, almost 8000 packages are on CRAN, with about one thousand more at BioConductor and probably another hundred at OmegaHat.

Support for multiple repositories is built deeply into R; mostly via the (default) package utils. Theupdate.packagesfunction (along with several others from the utils package) can be used with ease for these three default repositories as well as many others. But it seemed that support for simple creation and use of local repositories was missing.

Drat tries to help here and supports two principal modes:

• GitHub by leveraging gh-pages
• Other repos by using other storage where you can write and provide html access

See the next section about to get started, the package documentation, thedrat package page or theblog section on drat for more.

Installation

You can install the package from CRAN via the standard install.packages("drat"). Alternatively, you can also do

install.packages("drat", repos="http://eddelbuettel.github.io/drat")

to install directly from the drat repository.

Getting Started

See the vignettes

• Drat FAQ,
• Drat for Package Authors,
• Drat for Package Users
• Why Drat?
• Drat Lightning Talk at useR!2015

for the FAQ, two principal uses cases, basic motivation and an overview / introduction. The package documentation provides more details. Thedrat package page has a longer tutorial, and theblog section on drat has even more.

Status

The package has been available from CRAN since the Spring of 2015 and starting to get some use. Possible improvements, additions and next steps are listed in theTODO.mdfile.

A few drat repositories are starting to appear (besides this one). An incomplete list (looking at the direct forks as well as GitHub search):

• hrbrmstr
• yutannihilation
• gschofl
• csgillespie
• homerhanumat
• cboettig
• shabbychef
• RcppCore
• arilamstein
• piccolbo
• ghrr
• cloudyr
• dmlc

The rOpenSci project usesdrat to distribute their code and has written anice blog postabout it.

Travis Integration

Colin Gillespie has started to integrateTravis CI with drat, see hisdratTravis repository for more details, and the contributed vignetteCombining Drat and Travis

Author

Dirk Eddelbuettel, with contributions by Carl Boettiger, Sebastian Gibb, Colin Gillespie, Matt Jones, Thomas Leeper, Steven Pav and Jan Schulz.

License

GPL (>= 2)