R Observatory: Metrics for cowplot version 1.2.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

cowplot

1.2.0Package record

Streamlined Plot Theme and Plot Annotations for 'ggplot2'

249packages dependsuggested by 125

4.6Mdownloads / year

68.7%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Claus O. WilkeCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Provides various features that help with creating publication-quality figures with 'ggplot2', such as a set of themes, functions to align plots and arrange them into complex compound figures, and functions that make it easy to annotate plots and or mix plots with images. The package was originally written for internal use in the Wilke lab, hence the name (Claus O. Wilke's plot package). It has also been used extensively in the book Fundamentals of Data Visualization.

Changes in 1.2.0

fix get_legend() for redesigned ggplot legend system (#202)
fix test for ggplot object class (#210)
fix label order when laying out plots by column rather than by row (@Doubt-0KB, #203)

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("cowplot", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("wilkelab/cowplot")

Development version from wilkelab/cowplot. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-cowplot

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-cowplot

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-cowplot

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed). We list this channel from recorded autoCRAN download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 3.7 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-05-17
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-05-10
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 1.2.0

READMEYes · 162 wordsVignettesYes · 1 · dynamicNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 1.2.0Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 38 (2 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 96%27 run in a plain check · 1 only when donttest examples are enabled (R CMD check --as-cran)
Exported functions with examples: 76%
Documented parameters: 91%
Return-value docs: 19%
Help pages citing references: 0%

Vignettes (1)

Introduction to cowplot

How these are measured

Downloads

4.6M

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #168 · ~12.5K/day · ~379.4K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

364.4K30 days

996.5K90 days

4.6M1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on95.1K r2u157 autocran375K conda_forge2.8K c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

wilkelab/cowplot ↗Organization: wilkelab

760Stars

85Forks

36Open issues

2Open PRs

18Releases

429Commits

19Commit identities

429 commits · Last activity 2025-07-07 · +0.1% stars, 30d · Default branch at 1.2.0.9000, ahead of CRAN 1.2.0 (checked 2026-10-11)

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 81%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 1
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Stars over time

2025-10-11 · 7352026-10-13 · 760

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

9 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 6 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/wilkelab/cowplot on 2026-10-11.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

The R CMD check workflow runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and on R-devel

Governance and community (1)

Issue templates

Docs source (2)

pkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2025-07-07

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting (Codecov)

Show all practicesHide 2 practices

CRAN release process (2)

cran-comments.mdrevdep/

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

20 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing cowplot adds 17 packages (7 with compiled code, 14 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: ggplot2 6.0 MB, isoband 1.5 MB, farver 1.2 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 3.5.0

Imports (7)

ggplot2gridgtablegrDevicesmethodsrlang scales

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (17)

Cairo covr dplyr forcats gridGraphics knitrlatticemagick maps PASWR patchwork rmarkdown ragg testthat tidyr vdiffr VennDiagram

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

249direct

928indirect

Depends 4 · Imports 245

Suggested by 125

Show the 48 most downloaded dependentsHide the 48 most downloaded dependents

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

and 201 more dependents and 125 packages that suggest it on CRAN ↗

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (1)

Claus O. Wilke

Author, Maintainer since 0.3.0 (2015)

Listed in earlier versions (2)

Hadley Wickham

no longer listed · 0.3.0 to 0.7.0

RStudio

no longer listed · 0.8.0 to 0.9.4

Releases (21)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.2.0Latest
record
2025-07-07 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
1.1.3
record
2024-01-23 · diff ↗
1.1.2
record
2023-12-15 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
1.1.1
record
2020-12-30 · diff ↗
1.1.0
record
2020-09-08 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
agg_null_device
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
1.0.0
record
2019-07-11 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
ggsave

added 26 exports
as_grob, as_gtable, cairo_null_device, circle_key_glyph, get_panel_component, get_plot_component, get_subtitle, get_title, get_x_axis, get_y_axis, ggsave2, pdf_null_device, plot_component_names, plot_components, png_null_device, rectangle_key_glyph, set_null_device, stamp, stamp_bad, stamp_good, stamp_ugly, stamp_wrong, theme_half_open, theme_minimal_grid, theme_minimal_hgrid, theme_minimal_vgrid
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.9.4
record
2019-01-08 · diff ↗
0.9.3
record
2018-07-15 · diff ↗

Show 17 earlier eventsHide 17 earlier events

R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
0.9.2
record
2017-12-17 · diff ↗
0.9.1
record
2017-11-16 · diff ↗
0.9.0
record
2017-11-16 · diff ↗ ·
added 7 exports
axis_canvas, draw_image, get_panel, insert_xaxis_grob, insert_yaxis_grob, plot_to_gtable, theme_map
0.8.0
record
2017-07-30 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
GeomDrawGrob, align_margin
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
0.7.0
record
2016-10-28 · diff ↗ ·
removed 2 exports
plot_theme, switch_axis_position
0.6.3
record
2016-09-30 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
align_plots, get_legend
R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
0.6.2
record
2016-04-20 · diff ↗
0.6.1
record
2016-03-06 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
draw_figure_label
0.6.0
record
2015-12-19 · diff ↗
0.5.0
record
2015-07-01 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
add_sub, draw_label
0.4.0
record
2015-06-14 · diff ↗ ·
added 6 exports
draw_grob, gtable_remove_grobs, gtable_squash_cols, gtable_squash_rows, plot_theme, switch_axis_position
0.3.1
record
2015-06-04 · diff ↗
0.3.0
record
2015-06-03
R
R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16

Package metadata

First published: 2015-06-03
Total releases: 21 / 11 yrs
License: GPL-2 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.5.0
Download size: 1.6 MB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("cowplot")

Format

Wilke, C. O. (2025). cowplot: Streamlined Plot Theme and Plot Annotations for 'ggplot2' (Version 1.2.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.cowplot

This package has no citation file, so citation() returns this entry built from DESCRIPTION.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for cowplot version 1.2.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-18. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-18, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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