drat
What cute people say when they are pissed off
“Oh Drat, i lost my wallet”
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:
gh-pagesPlease see the next section about how to get started, the package documentation, the drat package page or the blog section on drat for more.
See the vignettes
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.
You can install the package from CRAN via the standard
or alternatively, you can also do
to install directly from the drat repository.
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):
The rOpenSci project uses drat to distribute their code and has written a nice blog post about it.
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
Dirk Eddelbuettel, with contributions by Carl Boettiger, Sebastian Gibb, Colin Gillespie, Matt Jones, Thomas Leeper, Steven Pav, Jan Schulz, Christoph Stepper, Felix G.M. Ernst, and Patrick Schratz.
GPL (>= 2)