Another tool to build an R Archive Network.
Command line utility to build and maintain your own CRAN.
Click here for official packaged releases
The real CRAN is amazing. Over 10 thousand additional packages for R published and available for free to the community.
The public CRAN system relies on a specific directory structure and the presence of PACKAGES files. These PACKAGES files contain a list of all the available packages in the repo, and are used by R's install.packages() function to check whether a package is available and what dependencies it might have.
alsoRAN is a tool the helps you build and maintain your own repo of R packages, but why is that needed? Well, if you're working inside a large organisation it's possible that you don't have access to the actual CRAN. Now, you could host a local mirror within the firewall, you could use a proxy solution that connects you to the real CRAN, or you could build and maintain your own!
Chances are you don't need access to all 10 thousand packages available on CRAN. Maybe your company has "blessed" a number of packages that are allowed to be used for business continuity purposes. Or maybe you just want to host a repo that contains just the packages that have been built internally. Either way, alsoRAN can help.
R packages, like drat and miniCRAN, are for R users and many people charged with the ongoing maintenance of these types of systems are not R users. The system administrator should not need to know anything about running R in order to maintain a CRAN-like repository. alsoran therefore provides a familiar command line interface in order to fit more comfortably into the sys-admin/DevOps ecosystem.
usage: ./src/usr/bin/alsoran [--] [--help] [--opts OPTS] [--repo REPO] [--file FILE] command
A tool to create your own R package repo like CRAN
positional arguments:
command One of 'init', 'add', 'update', 'serve' or 'version'
flags:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
optional arguments:
-x, --opts OPTS RDS file containing argument values
-r, --repo REPO CRAN repo directory path [default: .]
-f, --file FILE CRAN repo directory path
So to create a new alsoRAN repo in the current directory:
mkdir local-cran
cd local-cran
alsoran init
Or to initialise a new repo in a different directory.
alsoran init -r /path/to/repo
You can copy source package files into the correct location in the repo with:
alsoran add -f /path/to/package.tar.csv -r /path/to/repo
This will also update the PACKAGES files.
Alternatively, you can copy the source packages in by hand and then call the following to updates the PACKAGES files:
alsoran update -r /path/to/repo
alsoRAN also features a built in server for serving the repo over the network.
This can be started using:
alsoran serve -r /path/to/repo
Please be aware that 'alsoran serve' just serves the specified directory. If you run this in the wrong place you could end up serving files that you do not intend to. Use with caution!
The directory structure used by alsoRAN is easy to publish on a network such as your organisations internal network, using apache or nginx.
Installing packages from your custom alsoRAN repo is really simple for end users.
install.packages("PackageName", repos="https://yourLocalCranURL")
On linux based systems, it is possible to watch for activity on a directory tree, such as the creation of a new file in that tree, and then use that event to trigger a script. We can leverage this system to watch for changes to our alsoRAN repo, and rebuild the PACKAGES files each time there's a change.
To do this we need to install inotify-tools.
on Ubuntu Linux:
sudo apt install -y inotify-tools
On CentOS/RedHat:
sudo yum install -y inotify-tools
Then modify and run the following script.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
while true
do
inotifywait -e create,delete -r /path/to/your/repo && \
alsoran update -r /path/to/your/repo
done
There are monitoring and daemonisation flags for inotifywait ('-m' and '-d' respectively) but they just print messages out to the console and don't trigger an action.
Run the following to build with docker:
build docker all