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Using repositories other than CRAN with miniCRAN

Andrie de Vries

March 28, 2024

Source: vignettes/miniCRAN-non-CRAN-repos.rmd
miniCRAN-non-CRAN-repos.rmd

Although the package name miniCRAN seems to indicate you can only use CRAN as a repository, you can in fact use any CRAN-like repository.

This vignette contains some examples of how to refer to different package repositories, including CRAN, alternative mirrors of CRAN, R-Forge as well as BioConductor.

To simplify the code to show the salient features, we use a little helper function, index() that is a simple wrapper around available.packages():

# Wrapper around available.packages ---------------------------------------
 
index <- function(url, type = "source", filters = NULL, head = 5, 
                  cols = c("Package", "Version")) {
  contribUrl <- contrib.url(url, type = type)
  p <- available.packages(contribUrl, type = type, filters = filters)
  p[1:head, cols]
}

Using CRAN

The URL for the master mirror in Austria:

CRAN <- "https://cran.r-project.org"
index(CRAN)

Your output should look like this (albeit with different packages and version numbers):

              Package         Version
A3            "A3"            "1.0.0"
AalenJohansen "AalenJohansen" "1.0"  
AATtools      "AATtools"      "0.0.2"
ABACUS        "ABACUS"        "1.0.0"
abasequence   "abasequence"   "0.1.0"

Using a different mirror

You can also point to any other mirror, for example the snapshot taken on 2024-01-02 by Posit Public Package Manager:

p3m <- "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/2024-01-02"
index(p3m)

Using R-forge

R-forge has CRAN-like structure:

rforge <- "https://r-forge.r-project.org"
index(rforge)