drat (version 0.2.5)

drat-package: Easy-to-use package repository creation and access

Description

The drat package permits user to create and use ad-hoc package repositories. It takes advantage of GitHub accounts and ‘gh-pages’ branches which automatically become web-accessible and can be used to provide a repository. Alternatively, custom repository paths and addresses can be used.

Author

Dirk Eddelbuettel

Maintainer: Dirk Eddelbuettel <[e-mail]>

Details

Given a user account on GitHub, say, ‘eddelbuettel’, and a repository ‘drat’, we can infer an top-level repostory URL as such as https://eddelbuettel.github.io/drat/ by supplying only the username (as the rest is inferred by defaults). This allows us to create easily useable, identifiable and shareable per-user repositories---without the user having to create and administer a webserver anywhere.

Two higher level functions then allow both insertion of (source or binary) packages, as well as addition of a given drat repository to an R session so that package in the repository can be accesses.

References

The R Installation and Administration manual has more and details about repository creation

See Also

update.packages, available.packages, install.packages

Examples

  if (FALSE) {
  drat::addRepo("eddelbuettel")   # adds the repo of GitHub user 'eddelbuettel'
}