Overview

R-multiverse provides:

A home for packages that fall outside the scope of other repositories such as CRAN and Bioconductor.
Direct and timely distribution of package releases.
Assurance of package quality for production scenarios.

R-multiverse repositories

R-multiverse hosts two R package repositories:

Community: an open, inclusive, community-curated repository of R package releases pulled directly from their maintainers via GitHub and GitLab.
Production: a quarterly snapshot from Community of releases which pass transparent automated checks.

Installing packages

Each R-multiverse repository has a URL for the repos argument of install.packages(). For example, to install polars from Community: ¹

install.packages(
  "polars",
  repos = c("https://community.r-multiverse.org", getOption("repos"))
)

Production is deployed in periodic snapshots throughout the year. The current Production snapshot was deployed on 2025-03-15. It was tested with the base R 4.4 and CRAN packages from the dependency freeze on 2025-01-15. Please use the 2025-01-15 version of CRAN from Posit Public Package Manager (p3m) to install dependencies:²

install.packages(
  "polars",
  repos = c(
    "https://production.r-multiverse.org/2025-03-15",
    "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/2025-01-15"
  )
)

Other repositories

R-multiverse does not replace CRAN. In fact, most R-multiverse packages depend on CRAN packages. In production environments, the Production snapshot should be deployed alongside the version of base R and the p3m version of CRAN from the day of the corresponding dependency freeze. See the documentation of Production for more details.

Infrastructure

All R-multiverse source code is public and open-source. The code is licensed under MIT, and the logo has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. R-multiverse leverages R-universe, GitHub Actions, and Cloudflare. Cloudflare provides the r-multiverse.org domain and hosts Production snapshots in an R2 bucket.

How you can help

Spread the word: share R-multiverse with your colleagues.
Contribute your packages to R-multiverse.
Volunteer to become a moderator.

Support

R-multiverse originated from the R Consortium Repositories Working Group, and it was supported by R Consortium ISC grant 24-ISC-1-05.

Footnotes

Caution: when setting two repositories in the repos argument, the same package may be in both. install.packages() chooses the most current version, which could be in either repository.↩︎
Posit Public Package Manager (p3m) might not actually snapshot CRAN every day, but it still hosts a usable https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/yyyy-mm-dd URL, even if the underlying physical snapshot came from an earlier day. https://p3m.dev/__api__/repos/cran/transaction-dates lists all the physical snapshots.↩︎