miniCRAN

Build status

master: release: dev:

Create a mini version of CRAN containing only selected packages

Introduction

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.

Important functions:

• Find package dependencies: pkgDep()
• Make repository (with or without downloading packages): makeRepo()
• Add additonal packages (and their dependencies) to existing repository: addPackage()
• Update the versions of packages currently in the repository: updatePackages()

Installation:

Get the stable version from CRAN:

install.packages("miniCRAN")
library("miniCRAN")

Get the latest stable development version from github:

# Use `devtools` to install directly from github
library(devtools)
install_github("RevolutionAnalytics/miniCRAN")

Example:

# Determine and download the packages `ggplot2`, `plyr` and `reshape2`, including their dependencies:

library("miniCRAN")
pkgs <- c("ggplot2", "plyr", "reshape2")
makeRepo(pkgDep(pkgs), path=file.path(tempdir(), "miniCRAN"), download=TRUE)