R Observatory: Metrics for pkgload version 1.5.3

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

pkgload

1.5.3Package record

Simulate Package Installation and Attach

25packages dependsuggested by 140

10.1Mdownloads / year

69.0%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Lionel HenryCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗Declared funder: Posit Software, PBC

Simulates the process of installing a package and then attaching it. This is a key part of the 'devtools' package as it allows you to rapidly iterate while developing a package.

Changes in 1.5.3

When reloading a package, load_all() now runs the unload hooks of the previously loaded package (.onUnload() and user hooks registered with setHook()), whether it was loaded with pkgload or regularly. The old namespace and its DLL are still kept loaded so that dangling references continue to work, and errors thrown from .onUnload() are demoted to warnings so that they can't prevent reloading (#253).

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

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

install.packages("pkgload", 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("r-lib/pkgload")

Development version from r-lib/pkgload. 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-pkgload

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-pkgload

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-pkgload

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-release-macos-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-10-17
WARNING12 OK, 1 WARNING2026-10-01
OK13 OK2026-08-21
WARNING12 OK, 1 WARNING2026-08-17
OK13 OK2026-08-05

Show 8 earlier changesHide 8 earlier changes

NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-06-09
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-06-07
OK12 OK2026-04-25
ERROR13 OK, 1 ERROR2026-04-23
OK14 OK2026-04-22
ERROR13 OK, 1 ERROR2026-04-18
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 1.5.3

READMEYes · 114 wordsVignettesNoNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 1.5.3Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 26 (13 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 55%6 run in a plain check · 5 never run
Exported functions with examples: 48%
Documented parameters: 97%
Return-value docs: 5%
Help pages citing references: 0%

How these are measured

Downloads

10.1M

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #67 · ~27.6K/day · ~839.8K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

840.6K30 days

2.8M90 days

10.1M1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on241.8K r2u125 autocran403.7K conda_forge5.1K c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

r-lib/pkgload ↗Organization: r-lib

61Stars

53Forks

25Open issues

3Open PRs

18Releases

1,273Commits

69Commit identities

r

1,273 commits · Last activity 2026-07-06 · Default branch at 1.5.3.9000, ahead of CRAN 1.5.3 (checked 2026-10-11)

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 91%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 54
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 1

Forks over time

2026-07-09 · 522026-08-25 · 53

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

14 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 7 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/r-lib/pkgload 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)

Code of conduct

Docs source (3)

pkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-07-06 · The repository has a site deploy workflow

pkgdown site last built 2026-06-15

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting (Codecov)

Show all practicesHide 3 practices

CRAN release process (2)

cran-comments.mdrevdep/

Lint, format, editor (4)

Lint workflowAirVS CodeRStudio project

Git structural (1)

blame-ignore revs

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

AI coding toolsBeta

This repository shows signs of AI coding tools.

Claude Codefirst seen 2026-06-11
Seen in the repository: .claude, .claude/skills
Named in .Rbuildignore: .claude

Shared conventions any agent may read, so they name no particular tool.

Seen in the repository: AGENTS.md

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (updated 2026-09-27)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

19 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing pkgload adds 13 packages (6 with compiled code, 3.8 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: fs 1.4 MB, rlang 766 KB, cli 629 KB.

Depends (1)

R >= 3.4.0

Imports (11)

cli desc fs glue lifecyclemethodspkgbuild processx rlang rprojrootutils

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (10)

bitops jsonlite mathjaxr pak Rcpp remotes rstudioapi testthat usethis withr

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

25direct

383indirect

Imports 25

Suggested by 140

Show the 48 most downloaded packagesHide the 48 most downloaded packages

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

Suggests, most downloaded first

rlang tibble generics evaluate conflicted renv pak usethis pkgdown rstantools arrow downlit ggfun quarto mockr aisdk targets scrutiny DBItest golem butcher httptest2 Ryacas

and 117 more packages that suggest it on CRAN ↗

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (6)

Lionel Henry

Author, Maintainer since 1.2.4 (2021) · added in 1.2.4

Author

Author

Author

Contributor

Some namespace and vignette code extracted from base R

Posit Software, PBC

Copyright holder, Funder · added in 1.3.3

Previously maintained by Jim Hester (1.0.0 to 1.2.3).

Listed in earlier versions (1)

RStudio

no longer listed · 1.0.0 to 1.3.2.1

Releases (21)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

1.5.3Latest
record
2026-06-15 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.5.2
record
2026-04-22 · diff ↗
1.5.1
record
2026-04-01 · diff ↗
1.5.0
record
2026-02-03 · diff ↗
1.4.1
record
2025-09-23 · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
1.4.0
record
2024-06-28 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
1.3.4
record
2024-01-16 · diff ↗
1.3.3
record
2023-09-22 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
dev_topic_index, pkg_version_raw
1.3.2.1
record
2023-07-08 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
1.3.2
record
2022-11-16 · diff ↗
1.3.1
record
2022-10-28 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
dev_topic_find
1.3.0
record
2022-06-28 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
is_loading, unregister

Show 14 earlier eventsHide 14 earlier events

R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
1.2.4
record
2021-11-30 · diff ↗
1.2.3
record
2021-10-13 · diff ↗
1.2.2
record
2021-09-12 · diff ↗
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
1.2.1
record
2021-04-06 · diff ↗
1.2.0
record
2021-02-23 · diff ↗
1.1.0
record
2020-05-29 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
1.0.2
record
2018-10-29 · diff ↗
1.0.1
record
2018-10-11 · diff ↗
1.0.0
record
2018-07-08
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23

Package metadata

First published: 2018-07-08
Total releases: 21 / 8 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI · relicensed from GPL-3 in 1.4.1
Minimum R: ≥ 3.4.0
Download size: 87 KB

Appears in task views

Package Development and Maintenance

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("pkgload")

Format

Henry, L., Posit Software, PBC, R Core team, Chang, W., Hester, J., & Wickham, H. (2026). pkgload: Simulate Package Installation and Attach (Version 1.5.3) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.pkgload

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 pkgload version 1.5.3 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-17. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-17, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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