R Observatory: Metrics for distill version 1.6

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

distill

1.6Package record

'R Markdown' Format for Scientific and Technical Writing

2packages dependsuggested by 1

24.5Kdownloads / year

50.2%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Christophe DervieuxCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗Declared funder: Posit Software, PBC

Scientific and technical article format for the web. 'Distill' articles feature attractive, reader-friendly typography, flexible layout options for visualizations, and full support for footnotes and citations.

Changes in 1.6

RSS feed creation now works correctly for listings when no description is provided in one of the Rmd post (thanks, \@cpsyctc, \@apeterson91, #490, #448).
Fix an issue with line numbering on code chunks when highlight-downlit: false by tweaking Pandoc's default CSS rules (thanks, \@SES-CE, #473).
Internally use format() instead of as.character() with Dates to account for argument format= deprecation in R 4.3.0 (thanks, \@mbojan, #488).
Add a subtitle variable in HTML template placed between title and categories (thanks, \@dicook, #480).
Add author name in orcid image alt text (thanks, \@mitchelloharawild , \@ajrgodfrey, #494, rjournal/rjtools#86).
In distill_article(), metadata header in HTML is separated by <hr> to improve accessibility (thanks, @mitchelloharawild, #495, @ajrgodfrey, #rjournal/rjtools#92)

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

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

install.packages("distill", 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("rstudio/distill")

Development version from rstudio/distill. 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-distill

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-distill

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-distill

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: 1.5 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

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

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 1.6

README· In the repository, left out of the releaseVignettes· In the repository, left out of the releaseNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 1.6Citation fileNoWebsiteYes

Help pages: 10 (1 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 0%4 never run
Exported functions with examples: 44%
Documented parameters: 97%
Return-value docs: 11%
Help pages citing references: 0%

How these are measured

Downloads

24.5K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #3,129 · ~67/day · ~2K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

1.5K30 days

4K90 days

24.5K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on1.5K r2u3 autocran2.1K conda_forge86 c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

rstudio/distill ↗Organization: rstudio

426Stars

58Forks

145Open issues

4Open PRs

3Releases

1,414Commits

26Commit identities

License file reads as Apache-2.0 · 1,414 commits · Last activity 2023-11-22 · +0.2% stars, 30d · Default branch at 1.6.1, ahead of CRAN 1.6 (checked 2026-10-21)

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 92%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 19
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Stars over time

2025-04-15 · 4222026-10-06 · 426

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

9 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 5 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/rstudio/distill on 2026-10-21.

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 (2)

Code of conductContributing guide

Docs source (3)

README.Rmdpkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2023-11-22

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting (Codecov)

Show all practicesHide 1 practice

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (2026-10-20)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

28 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing distill adds 48 packages (27 with compiled code, 34 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: stringi 11 MB, bslib 5.6 MB, sass 2.9 MB.

Depends (0)

none

Imports (22)

base64enc bookdown digest downlit htmltools jsonlite knitr lubridate (>= 1.7.10)mime openssl png rmarkdown rprojroot rstudioapistatsstringrtoolsutilswhisker xfun (>= 0.18)xml2 yaml

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (9)

covr DiagrammeR htmlwidgets progress r2d3 rsconnect shiny testthat withr

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

2direct

1indirect

Imports 2

Suggested by 1

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

rjtools memoiR

Suggests, most downloaded first

nuts

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (12)

Christophe Dervieux

Author, Maintainer since 1.4 (2022) · added in 1.4

JJ Allaire

Author

Rich Iannone

Author

Alison Presmanes Hill

Author · added in 1.0

Yihui Xie

Author

Gábor Csárdi

Contributor, Copyright holder

whoami

Denis Demchenko

Contributor, Copyright holder

https://github.com/lancedikson/bowser

Google LLC

Contributor, Copyright holder

https://distill.pub/guide/

JooYoung Seo

Contributor · added in 0.8

The Polymer Authors

Contributor, Copyright holder

https://www.webcomponents.org/polyfills/

Nick Williams

Contributor, Copyright holder

https://wicky.nillia.ms/headroom.js/

Posit Software, PBC

Copyright holder, Funder · added in 1.6

Previously maintained by JJ Allaire (0.7 to 1.3).

Listed in earlier versions (2)

RStudio, Inc.

no longer listed · 0.7 to 1.3

RStudio, PBC

no longer listed · 1.4 to 1.5

Releases (9)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
1.6Latest
record
2023-10-06 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
1.5
record
2022-09-07 · diff ↗
1.4
record
2022-05-12 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
1.3
record
2021-10-13 · diff ↗
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
1.2
record
2021-01-13 · diff ↗
1.1
record
2020-12-02 · diff ↗
1.0
record
2020-10-22 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
create_article, create_theme, rename_post_dir
0.8
record
2020-06-04 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
0.7
record
2019-05-03

Show 1 earlier eventHide 1 earlier event

R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26

Package metadata

First published: 2019-05-03
Total releases: 9 / 7 yrs
License: Apache License 2.0 OSI
Download size: 241 KB

Appears in task views

Reproducible Research

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("distill")

Format

Dervieux, C., Posit Software, PBC, Allaire, J., Csárdi, G., Demchenko, D., Google LLC, , Iannone, R., Presmanes Hill, A., Seo, J., The Polymer Authors, , Williams, N., & Xie, Y. (2023). distill: 'R Markdown' Format for Scientific and Technical Writing (Version 1.6) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.distill

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 distill version 1.6 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-24. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-24, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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