miniCRAN-package: Create a Private Version of CRAN Containing Only Selected Packages

Description

At the end of 2014, CRAN consisted of more than 6,000 packages. Many organisations need to maintain a private mirror of CRAN, but with only a subset of packages that are relevant to them. miniCRAN makes it possible to create an internally consistent repository consisting of selected packages from CRAN-like repositories. The user specifies a set of desired packages, and miniCRAN recursively reads the dependency tree for these packages, then downloads only this subset. There are many reasons for not creating a complete mirror CRAN using rsync:

You may wish to mirror only a subset of CRAN, for security, legal compliance or any other in-house reason
You may wish to restrict internal package use to a subset of public packages, to minimize package duplication, or other reasons of coding standards
You may wish to make packages available from public repositories other than CRAN, e.g. BioConductor, r-forge, OmegaHat, etc.
You may wish to add custom in-house packages to your repository

The ambition of miniCRAN is to eventually satisfy all of these considerations.

Arguments

1. Making a private repo

pkgAvail: Read from a local (or remote) CRAN-like repository and determine available packages.
pkgDep: Find (recursive) package dependencies.
makeRepo: Make a mini CRAN repository, by downloading packages (and their dependencies) and creating the appropriate file structure for a repository. This allows you to use functions likeavailable.packagesandinstall.packageson your local repository.

This subset will be internally consistent, i.e. the following functions will work as expected:

The main function is makeRepo - this will download all the required packages, with their dependencies, into the appropriate repository file structure, and then create the repository index (PACKAGES) file.

2. Updating packages in a repo

oldPackages: Indicates packages which have a (suitable) later version on the repositories
updatePackages: Offers to download and install such packages

3. Creating and visualising dependencies

To get a recursive list of dependencies as well as a plot, use pkgDep() followed by makeDepGraph().

pkgDep: Find (recursive) package dependencies.
makeDepGraph: Create graph of selected package dependencies.
plot.pkgDepGraph: Create a visualization of the dependency graph