The R Journal: article published in 2017, volume 9:1

Hosting Data Packages via drat: A Case Study with Hurricane Exposure Data
G. Brooke Anderson and Dirk Eddelbuettel , The R Journal (2017) 9:1, pages 486-497.

Abstract Data-only packages offer a way to provide extended functionality for other R users. However, such packages can be large enough to exceed the package size limit (5 megabytes) for the Comprehen sive R Archive Network (CRAN). As an alternative, large data packages can be posted to additional repostiories beyond CRAN itself in a way that allows smaller code packages on CRAN to access and use the data. The drat package facilitates creation and use of such alternative repositories and makes it particularly simple to host them via GitHub. CRAN packages can draw on packages posted to drat repositories through the use of the ‘Additonal_repositories’ field in the DESCRIPTION file. This paper describes how R users can create a suite of coordinated packages, in which larger data packages are hosted in an alternative repository created with drat, while a smaller code package that interacts with this data is created that can be submitted to CRAN.

Received: 2017-02-17; online 2017-05-10
CRAN packages: NMMAPSlite, stashR, rnoaa, tigris, UScensus2000, drat, grattan, hurricaneexposure, devtools, rcmdcheck, git2r, littler, knitr, roxygen2
CRAN Task Views implied by cited CRAN packages: ReproducibleResearch, WebTechnologies

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

@article{RJ-2017-026,
  author = {G. Brooke Anderson and Dirk Eddelbuettel},
  title = {{Hosting Data Packages via drat: A Case Study with Hurricane
          Exposure Data}},
  year = {2017},
  journal = {{The R Journal}},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2017-026},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2017-026},
  pages = {486--497},
  volume = {9},
  number = {1}
}