New features in checkpoint v0.3.15 now on CRAN

by Andrie de Vries

I am pleased to announce that we have released a new version of the checkpoint package to CRAN.  The goal of checkpoint is to solve the problem of package reproducibility in R.

Easy reproducible workflow using checkpoint()

We first announced checkpoint and the Reproducible R Toolkit during October, 2014. In February, 2015, we then announced several improvements, e.g. support for changing the location of the checkpoint folder. Then, in March 2015, we made performance improvements to checkpoint, for example by not reinstalling packages if they exists already.

Our latest release of checkpoint is version 0.3.15. Compared to the previous release on CRAN (v0.3.10), the new version v0.3.15 adds:

• Support for the https protocol for downloading packages from MRAN (#186)
• Allow user to specify a custom MRAN mirror (#184)
• Defaults to https://mran.revolutionanalytics.com/snapshot by default in R versions 3.2.0 and later, if https support is enableds
• User modifiable MRAN default URL.  To change the URL, use 

options(checkpoint.mranUrl = ...)

• Automatically add knitr and rmarkdown packages if .Rmd files found #173
  • This behaviour is controlled by the auto.install.knitr argument (default TRUE)
• If a snapshot doesn't exist, suggest the previous and next available snapshots #182

You can find the source code at github, and find news updates on the releases page.