Drat R Archive Template
The R package ecosystem is one of the cornerstones of the success seen by R. As of this writing, over 6500 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 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, the drat package page or the blog section on drat for more.
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.
See the vignettes
for the FAQ and two principal uses cases. Also see Why Drat? for basic motivation. The package documentation provides more details. The drat package page has a longer tutorial, and the blog section on drat has even more.
The package is available from CRAN and starting to get some use. Possible improvements, additions and next steps are listed in the TODO.md file.
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
Colin Gillespie has started to integrate Travis CI with drat, see his dratTravis repository for more details, and the contributed vignette Combining Drat and Travis
Dirk Eddelbuettel
GPL (>= 2)