A new version, now at 0.0.4, of the drat package arrived on CRAN yesterday. Its name stands for drat R Archive Template, and it helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages, and is finding increasing by other projects.

Version 0.0.4 brings both new code and more documentation:

• support for binary repos on Windows and OS X thanks to Jan Schulz;
• new (still raw) helper functions initRepo() to create a git-based repository, and pruneRepo() to remove older versions of packages;
• the insertRepo() functions now uses tryCatch() around git commands (with thanks to Carl Boettiger);
• when adding a file to a drat repo we ensure that the repo path does not contains spaces (with thank to Stefan Bache);
• stress that file-based repos need a URL of the form file:/some/path with one colon but not two slashes (also thanks to Stefan Bache);
• new Using Drat with Travis CI vignette thanks to Colin Gillespie;
• new Drat FAQ vignette;
• other fixes and extensions.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.