microCRAN

Stand-alone HTTP capable CRAN repository, that fully supports R's install.packages and available.packages. It also contains API endpoints for end-users to add/update packages.

This package can supplement miniCRAN, which has functions for maintaining a local (partial) copy of CRAN. microCRAN adds the HTTP capability that allows us to use the local repository without having direct access to the local files.

Current version is bare-minimum without any user/access-control or much security.

Getting started

library(microCRAN)

# starts a site at http://127.0.0.1:<port>/
microCRAN('/path/to/local/repository')

library(plumber)
# alternativly modify the router a bit before running it:
microCRAN('/path/to/local/repository', prefix = '/cran/, run = FALSE) |>
  pr_get('/hello', \(name) { paste('Hello', name) }, serializer = serializer_text()) |>
  pr_run(port = '1448')
# repository now available at http://127.0.01:1448/cran/

Docker

The accompanying Dockerfile is intended for setting up a neat environment for development.

Following example builds the source package and checks it, assuming the git repo is cloned to ~/Rpackage/microcran

docker build -t microcran-dev .
docker run -v ~/Rpackages:/root -w /root/microcran microcran-dev R -e "devtools::document()" -e "devtools::check(manual = TRUE, cran = TRUE)"