17  Contribute

R-universe is developed in the open on GitHub.

17.1 Website

The R-universe website is not a static website. All pages and cranlike indexes are generated on request from a database.

R-universe runs on self hosted server in NYC, but all traffic is routed via Cloudflare CDN. Cloudflare features include CDN level caching. When multiple users (anywhere) request the same file or page within 60s, the request is serviced directly from the cloudflare cache, and never hits the backend server. More details.

17.2 Runner images

On Linux we use a docker image for all the building, where we can add/remove tools.

On Mac and Windows we rely on the runner images provided by GitHub Actions

On top of the Mac and Windows image we use https://github.com/r-universe-org/actions to install some extra tooling specifically for R. In the case of MacOS we install the bundle of system libraries provided by CRAN from https://mac.r-project.org/bin/darwin23/arm64/ and some other tools.

17.3 Rtools

We use the version of Rtools that is preinstalled by GitHub Actions, which is generally the latest CRAN version.