drat: Drat R Archive Template
drat
What cute people say when they are pissed off
“Oh Drat, i lost my wallet”
Background
The R package ecosystem is one of the cornerstones of the success seen by R. As of July 2020, over 16000 packages are on CRAN, with about one thousand more at BioConductor.
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
- Drat FAQ,
- Drat for Package Authors,
- Drat for Package Users
- Why Drat?
- Combining Drat and Travis
- Drat Lightning Talk at useR!2015
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="https://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):
- yutannihilation
- gschofl
- csgillespie
- shabbychef
- RcppCore
- arilamstein
- piccolbo
- ghrr
- cloudyr
- dmlc
- thospfuller
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 Felix Ernst, Neal Fultz, Colin Gillespie, Christoph Stepper, Thomas Leeper, Mark van der Loo, Jan Gorecki, and others.
License
GPL (>= 2)