The drat package makes it trivially easy to deploy package repositories. There are essentially just two ways to use a package repository:
This vignette deals with the second case: How to use drat as package users. A companion vignette for package authors is available as well.
drat makes
it very easy to use an R package repository hosted on GitHub.
It assumes simply that the R package repository is hosted in a GitHub
repository named drat. With that, we only need one piece of
information: the name of the repository (and if this seem mysterious see
the discussion in the companion
vignette. So
adds my drat repo (which contains only the drat package in order to keep the footprint of forking small).
One can add several repositories at once. The following statements adds the repo for Rcpp and my catch-all ghrr repo:
Note that this use a vectorised first argument, rather than three arguments.
Sometimes we want to use repositories not conforming to the GitHub
drat pattern. This use case may simply be a different URL,
or server. Another common (and very useful case) is for a locally hosted
repository.
In this case we use the two argument form: the first argument sets
the name within the repos vector, and the second provides
the local (filesystem-based) or remote (web-based) URL:
where the same local network repository example is used as in the
example in the companion
vignette. Note that we start the location URL with
file:.
drat makes
it very easy to register additional package repositories. One or more
calls to drat::addRepo() is all that it takes as shown
above. After that, one can use install.packages() or
update.packages() just as before, but with the additional
repositories at one’s disposal.