Programming

The new RStudio Package Manager is now generally available

2 min read

The Rstudio team announced the general availability of their latest RStudio professional product, namely, RStudio Package Manager, two days ago. It explores features such as CRAN access, approved subsets of CRAN packages, adding internal packages from GitHub, and optimized experience for R users among others.

RStudio Package Manager is an on-premises server product that helps teams and organizations centralize and organize R packages. In other words, it allows R users and the IT team to work together to build a central repository for R packages.

Let’s discuss the features of this new Package Manager.

CRAN access

RStudio Package Manager allows R users to access CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network) without requiring a network exception on every production node. It also helps automate CRAN updates on your schedule. Moreover, you can optimize the disk usage and only download the packages that you need.

However, RStudio Package Manager does not provide binary packages from CRAN. It only provides source packages. This limitation will be addressed in the future.

Approved subsets of CRAN packages

RStudio Package Manager enables admins to create approved subsets of CRAN packages. It also makes sure that the subsets remain stable despite the adding or updating of packages.

Adding internal packages using CLI

Administrators can now add internal packages using the CLI. For instance, if your internal packages are in Git, then the RStudio Package Manager can automatically track your Git repositories. This is also capable of making the commits accessible to users.

Optimized experience for R users

RStudio Package Manager offers a seamless experience that gets optimized for R users. For instance, all packages are versioned which automatically makes the older versions accessible to users.

This package Manager is also capable of recording the usage statistics. These metrics help administrators conduct audits and make it easy for R users to discover the popular and most useful packages.

For more information, check out the official Rstudio package manager blog.

Read Next

Getting Started with RStudio

Introducing R, RStudio, and Shiny

Natasha Mathur

Tech writer at the Packt Hub. Dreamer, book nerd, lover of scented candles, karaoke, and Gilmore Girls.

Share
Published by
Natasha Mathur

Recent Posts

Top life hacks for prepping for your IT certification exam

I remember deciding to pursue my first IT certification, the CompTIA A+. I had signed…

3 years ago

Learn Transformers for Natural Language Processing with Denis Rothman

Key takeaways The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN…

3 years ago

Learning Essential Linux Commands for Navigating the Shell Effectively

Once we learn how to deploy an Ubuntu server, how to manage users, and how…

3 years ago

Clean Coding in Python with Mariano Anaya

Key-takeaways:   Clean code isn’t just a nice thing to have or a luxury in software projects; it's a necessity. If we…

3 years ago

Exploring Forms in Angular – types, benefits and differences   

While developing a web application, or setting dynamic pages and meta tags we need to deal with…

3 years ago

Gain Practical Expertise with the Latest Edition of Software Architecture with C# 9 and .NET 5

Software architecture is one of the most discussed topics in the software industry today, and…

3 years ago