drat
Drat R Archive Template
Background
The R package ecosystem is one of the cornerstones of the success seen by R. As of September 2017, over 11000 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. 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
Please see the next section about how to get started, the package documentation, the drat package page or the blog section on drat for more.
Getting Started
See the vignettes
for the FAQ, two principal uses cases, basic motivation and an overview / introduction. The package documentation provides more details. The drat package page has a longer tutorial, and the blog section on drat has even more.
Installation
You can install the package from CRAN via the standard
install.packages("drat")or alternatively, you can also do
install.packages("drat", repos="http://eddelbuettel.github.io/drat")to install directly from the drat repository.
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 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):
The rOpenSci project uses drat to distribute their code and has written a nice blog post about it.
Travis Integration
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
Author
Dirk Eddelbuettel, with contributions by Carl Boettiger, Sebastian Gibb, Colin Gillespie, Matt Jones, Thomas Leeper, Steven Pav and Jan Schulz.
License
GPL (>= 2)