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Patricio Moracho
Asked: 2022-06-17 09:59:31 +0800 CST 2022-06-17 09:59:31 +0800 CST

How to get the history of a CRAN package?

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I would like to know how to obtain the list of versions of a certain package from the CRAN repository, so far what I have been able to observe is that with each package the uploaded versions are maintained, for example taking as a case shiny, we can access this urlwhere we can see the versions uploaded, the date and eventually download that version. It occurred to me to process the HTML and get this data, but is there any other more direct way?

r

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    A convenient way is to use the package functionality pkgcache, specifically, to list the versions:

    subset(pkgcache::cran_archive_list(), package == 'shiny')

# A data frame: 43 × 6
   package version raw                      mtime               url                                                 mirror              
 * <chr>   <chr>   <chr>                    <dttm>              <chr>                                               <chr>               
 1 shiny   0.2.3   shiny/shiny_0.2.3.tar.gz 2012-12-01 04:16:21 https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sh… https://cloud.r-pro…
 2 shiny   0.2.4   shiny/shiny_0.2.4.tar.gz 2012-12-18 11:52:11 https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sh… https://cloud.r-pro…
 3 shiny   0.3.0   shiny/shiny_0.3.0.tar.gz 2013-01-24 04:08:45 https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sh… https://cloud.r-pro…
 4 shiny   0.4.0   shiny/shiny_0.4.0.tar.gz 2013-02-22 04:23:41 https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sh… https://cloud.r-pro…
 5 shiny   0.5.0   shiny/shiny_0.5.0.tar.gz 2013-03-29 04:58:49 https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sh… https://cloud.r-pro…
 6 shiny   0.6.0   shiny/shiny_0.6.0.tar.gz 2013-06-05 15:56:28 https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sh… https://cloud.r-pro…
 7 shiny   0.7.0   shiny/shiny_0.7.0.tar.gz 2013-08-27 12:21:08 https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sh… https://cloud.r-pro…
 8 shiny   0.8.0   shiny/shiny_0.8.0.tar.gz 2013-10-30 03:33:50 https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sh… https://cloud.r-pro…
 9 shiny   0.9.0   shiny/shiny_0.9.0.tar.gz 2014-03-18 17:22:13 https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sh… https://cloud.r-pro…
10 shiny   0.9.1   shiny/shiny_0.9.1.tar.gz 2014-03-19 16:56:55 https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/sh… https://cloud.r-pro…
# … with 33 more rows

    The functionality is based on the fact that CRAN publishes a database Rdswith all this information, so even without using this package, it is not very complicated to implement a function that allows us to solve this issue:

    get_pkg_history_from_cran <- local({ 
  
  meta <- paste0(contrib.url(getOption("repos"), "source"), "/Meta/archive.rds")
  con <- gzcon(url(meta, "rb"))
  cran_history <- readRDS(con)
  rm(meta, con)
  
  function(pkgname) { 
    df <- cran_history[[pkgname]]
    df$pkgname <- pkgname
    df$file <- rownames(df)
    rownames(df) <- NULL
    df[ , c("pkgname", "file", "size", "mtime", "uname", "grname")]
    }
})

head(get_pkg_history_from_cran("shiny"))
  pkgname                        file    size               mtime  uname    grname
1   shiny   shiny/shiny_0.10.0.tar.gz  973769 2014-06-14 02:29:57 ripley cranadmin
2   shiny   shiny/shiny_0.10.1.tar.gz  978367 2014-07-26 04:02:37 ripley cranadmin
3   shiny shiny/shiny_0.10.2.1.tar.gz  995078 2014-10-01 13:40:47 hornik cranadmin
4   shiny shiny/shiny_0.10.2.2.tar.gz  995046 2014-12-08 17:48:32 ripley cranadmin
5   shiny   shiny/shiny_0.10.2.tar.gz  995265 2014-09-30 03:01:29 ripley cranadmin
6   shiny   shiny/shiny_0.11.1.tar.gz 1305406 2015-02-10 21:00:44 ligges cranadmin

    Note: The function is designed to "cache" the metadata between each execution.

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