drat 
Drat R Archive Template
Background
The R package ecosystem is one of the cornerstones of the success seen by R. As of this writing, over 6200 packages are on CRAN, several hundred more at BioConductor and at OmegaHat.
Support for multiple repositories is built deeply into R; mostly via the
(default) package utils. The
update.packages
function (along with several others from the utils package) can 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, the drat package page or the blog section on drat for more.
Getting Started
You can install the package from CRAN via the
standard install.packages("drat"). Alternatively, for a first
installation, you can also do
install.packages("drat", repos="http://eddelbuettel.github.io/drat")
to install directly from the drat repository. After either initial installation, you can add line such as
drat:::add("eddelbuettel")
to your session or startup files (see help(Startup)) and use
update.packages() as usual---also reflection the new drat archive.
Package insertion into a repo then works by passing the package tarball
filename as an argument to insertPackage() or its shorthand variant:
drat:::insert("drat_0.0.1.tar.gz")
You can now add, commit and push the new version. A somewhat experimental
option also exists for the insertPackage() aka drat:::insert() function.
The package documentation provides more detils; the drat package page has a longer tutorial, and the blog section on drat has even more.
Status
The package is now available from CRAN. A few possible improvements, additions and next steps are listed in the TODO.md file.
A few drat repositories are starting to appear (besides this one). Via a combination of looking at the direct forks as well as GitHub search, I became aware of these:
Author
Dirk Eddelbuettel
License
GPL (>= 2)