CRAN/E is a modern PWA (Progressive Web App) that serves as a search engine and information display for packages hosted on CRAN. CRAN/E means 'The Comprehensive R Archive Network, Enhanced' and aims at finding R-packages as fast as possible.
You can use CRAN/E directly in any modern browser. If supported, CRAN/E can provide its best performance by using local databases and effective caching. CRAN/E can also be installed locally in Chromium-based browsers. For more information regarding PWAs, please visit this great guide.
You can directly use the typeahead search of CRAN/E in Raycast. We published an extension on the Raycast Store to search for packages and authors. All CRAN/E Raycast extensions are developed as FOSS as well at flaming-codes/crane-raycast.
CRAN/E is also available via the Play Store on Android and Chrome OS devices. Please note that this store app is equivalant to the PWA and only repackaged for the Play Store.
If you prefer, you can also install CRAN/E via the Microsoft Store. Please note that this store app is equivalant to the PWA and only repackaged for the Microsoft Store.
This repository contains all code required to build the Frontend of CRAN/E. We decided to develop it as OSS as we believe in the advantage of a strong community as well as transparency regarding our development.
CRAN/E is not a package hosting solution for R-code. It's sole purpose is to provide a simple and effective interface for finding packages hosted on CRAN.
You find the site code (frontend & main backend) in /web. You find different smaller backend-only services in /services/.... The main code in /web is deployed on Vercel's Edge Platform and uses SvelteKit to deliver the pages as well as serve endpoints to fetch their data. The /services/... contain different smaller backend-only services that are deployed on other platforms, like fly.io.
The official CRAN is in a desperate visual state. Although it's using a very simple structure and basically no potentially distracting styling, using the original site is hard for a few reasons:
- no search interface
- all packages in the overview get loaded at once
- using outdated and deprecated technology, such as
<frameset>
Therefore we decided to develop a new user interface with search capabilities, that's working on all screen classes using state-of-the-art APIs.
This repo uses the web-directory for the PWA codebase. Isolated backend services are located in the services-directory. The web-directory is a SvelteKit project. The services-directory contains different backend-only services that can be deployed on different platforms.
We openly encourage everyone to submit bug reports and new ideas to consistently improve the overall app experience.
For new features you want to add, please use the Github Discussions feature of this repo. We don't blindly accept feature requests as issues. Each feature requests is discussed first, and if a consent is achieved, the progress for implementing it will be tracked via an issue.
For new bug reports, please create an issue in this repository. The issue setup will guide through the necessary data required for submission.
Please visit the wiki-pages of this repo for an overview of the architecture.
This code is mainly created and maintained by flaming.codes.