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.

Details

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.

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 like utils::available.packages() and utils::install.packages() on 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.

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

Creating 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

Package options

minicran.mran: preferred p3m URL. Defaults to https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran for R versions 3.2.2 and greater. Versions earlier than 3.2.2 use HTTP instead of HTTPS.

Author

Maintainer: Andrie de Vries apdevries@gmail.com [copyright holder]

Other contributors: