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Using repositories other than CRAN with miniCRAN

Using repositories other than CRAN with miniCRAN

Andrie de Vries

April 16, 2026

Although the package name miniCRAN seems to indicate you can only use CRAN as a repository, you can in fact use any CRAN-like repository.

This vignette contains some examples of how to refer to different package repositories, including CRAN, alternative mirrors of CRAN, R-Forge as well as BioConductor.

To simplify the code to show the salient features, we use a little helper function, index() that is a simple wrapper around available.packages():

# Wrapper around available.packages ---------------------------------------
 
index <- function(url, type = "source", filters = NULL, head = 5, 
                  cols = c("Package", "Version")) {
  contribUrl <- contrib.url(url, type = type)
  p <- available.packages(contribUrl, type = type, filters = filters)
  p[1:head, cols]
}

Using CRAN

The URL for the master mirror in Austria:

CRAN <- "https://cran.r-project.org"
index(CRAN)

Your output should look like this (albeit with different packages and version numbers):

              Package         Version
A3            "A3"            "1.0.0"
AalenJohansen "AalenJohansen" "1.0"  
AATtools      "AATtools"      "0.0.2"
ABACUS        "ABACUS"        "1.0.0"
abasequence   "abasequence"   "0.1.0"

Using a different mirror

You can also point to any other mirror, for example the snapshot taken on 2024-01-02 by Posit Public Package Manager:

p3m <- "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/2024-01-02"
index(p3m)

Using R-forge

R-forge has CRAN-like structure:

rforge <- "https://r-forge.r-project.org"
index(rforge)

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