The new RStudio Package Manager is now generally available

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.

Getting Started with RStudio

Introducing R, RStudio, and Shiny