Skip to content
Prev 20989 / 21316 Next

[Bioc-devel] Help Remote Installations

In addition to what's already been said (list them under Suggests), I
encourage you to make those package available via
https://r-universe.dev/, instead of asking users to install them
directly from GitHub (via remotes::install_github(...)). The idea is
that you provide your own only package repository, e.g.
https://ngsFC.r-universe.dev/. With R-universe you, and users, also
get the benefit of automatic testing there and automatic builds of
Windows and macOS package binaries, and more importantly those
packages can be installed using install.packages().

Note that you do not have to be the owner of those GitHub repositories
to make them available on R-universe. You can create your own set of
custom packages you want to provide this way. For example, you can
install Pharmaverse-related packages from
https://pharmaverse.r-universe.dev/. They provide packages from
multiple sources. All they have to do achieve this is to create a
GitHub repo with a special name
https://github.com/pharmaverse/pharmaverse.r-universe.dev/, and then
provide a one JSON file specifying which packages to include and where
those package lives, cf.
https://github.com/pharmaverse/pharmaverse.r-universe.dev/blob/main/packages.json.

Finally, with packages on R-universe, you can list specifying:

Additional_repositories: https://ngsFC.r-universe.dev

'R CMD check' acknowledges 'Additional_repositories' - it's part of
the core R infrastructure. I know there's an idea for
install.packages(..., dependencies = TRUE) to eventually automatically
install from such repositories too. We're not there yet though.

R-universe is great, it's fully operational, is becoming a de-facto
standard, and, I think, is our best option for bringing in non-CRAN,
non-Bioconductor dependencies.

/Henrik

On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 6:45?AM Kern, Lori via Bioc-devel
<bioc-devel at r-project.org> wrote:
Message-ID: <CAFDcVCTsdWsEJ4q9hD3pRPG0WED=s5A92Kf5VZwuiP=f7j_0Bw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <BL1PR12MB53015AC114ACA1933D964936F991A@BL1PR12MB5301.namprd12.prod.outlook.com>