R Observatory: Metrics for targets version 1.12.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

targets

1.12.0Package record

Dynamic Function-Oriented 'Make'-Like Declarative Pipelines

9packages dependsuggested by 13

206Kdownloads / year

88.7%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by William Michael LandauCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗Declared funder: Eli Lilly and Company

Pipeline tools coordinate the pieces of computationally demanding analysis projects. The 'targets' package is a 'Make'-like pipeline tool for statistics and data science in R. The package skips costly runtime for tasks that are already up to date, orchestrates the necessary computation with implicit parallel computing, and abstracts files as R objects. If all the current output matches the current upstream code and data, then the whole pipeline is up to date, and the results are more trustworthy than otherwise. The methodology in this package borrows from GNU 'Make' (2015, ISBN:978-9881443519) and 'drake' (2018, doi:10.21105/joss.00550).

Changes in 1.12.0

Avoid loading non-targets in tar_load(everything()) (#1529, @pitakakariki).
For internal consistency, return NA_character_ from tar_path_target() when format is "file" (#1532, @noamross).
Add tar_option_unset() (#1521, @noamross).
Use a new TAR_ACTIVE environment variable instead of a field of the tar_runtime object for tar_runtime() (https://github.com/ropensci/tarchetypes/issues/232, @lgaborini).
Add tar_igraph() and recommend it along with igraph::find_cycle() for debugging (#1562, @tylermorganwall).
Avoid the unclean shutdown message in the clustermq multi-process scheduler by calling cleanup() repeatedly until it returns TRUE. Uses exponential backoff to avoid excessive CPU load.
Use sequential controller in covr.
Ensure hash stability of vector slices in R >= 4.6.0 (#1566).
Use a dummy send instead of send_wait() to work around <https://github.com/mschubert/clustermq/issues/340> (#1566).
Set strict = TRUE by default in tidyselect::eval_select() to make tidyselect interfaces consistent with dplyr::select() (except the exclude argument of graph functions, which need to allow names to not exist in the list of choices) (#1563, @statzhero).

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

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

install.packages("targets", 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("ropensci/targets")

Development version from ropensci/targets. 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-targets

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-targets

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-targets

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: 10.3 min · r-oldrel-macos-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-04
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-06-09
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-06-07
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 1.12.0

README· In the repository, left out of the releaseVignettesYes · 1 · staticNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 1.12.0Citation fileYes · cites a publicationWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Cites a JOSS paper

Help pages: 162 (34 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 99%136 run in a plain check (73 of them under a condition) · 1 hold no code
Exported functions with examples: 85%
Documented parameters: 99%
Return-value docs: 84%
Help pages citing references: 2%

Vignettes (1)

An overview of targets HTML

How these are measured

Downloads

206K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #906 · ~564/day · ~17.2K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

13.5K30 days

46.3K90 days

206K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on3.7K r2u11 autocran7.1K conda_forge127 c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

ropensci/targets ↗Organization: ropensci

1,101Stars

86Forks

2Open issues

0Open PRs

60Releases

3,781Commits

26Commit identities

reproducibilityhigh-performance-computingrdata-sciencepipelinerstatsr-packageworkflow

3,781 commits · Last activity 2026-05-13 · +0.5% stars, 30d · Default branch at 1.12.0.9001, ahead of CRAN 1.12.0 (checked 2026-10-11) · Discussions: 738 posts

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 89%
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

2025-10-18 · 1,0212026-10-10 · 1,101

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

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

Checks run against github.com/ropensci/targets 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 (4)

Code of conduct (inherited from ropensci)Contributing guideIssue templatesPR template

Docs source (3)

README.Rmdpkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2021-01-12

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting

Show all practicesHide 2 practices

Research and citation (1)

codemeta.json

Lint, format, editor (3)

lintrLint workflowRStudio project

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

50 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing targets adds 29 packages (17 with compiled code, 17 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: data.table 5.7 MB, igraph 4.8 MB, vctrs 1.0 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 3.5.0

Imports (19)

base64url callr clicodetoolsdata.table igraph (>= 2.0.0)knitr prettyunits ps R6 rlang secretbasestatstibble tidyselecttoolsutilsvctrs yaml

LinkingTo (0)

none

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

9direct

1indirect

Imports 9

Suggested by 13

Show all 22 packagesHide all 22 packages

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

tarchetypes nlmixr2targets gittargets jagstargets ravepipeline geotargets sqltargets tarchives tarpolyglot

Suggests, most downloaded first

knitr pipeflow amadeus worcs data.validator realestatebr eyeprocess fastreg SCIproj metrosp repana chopin mortar

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (6)

William Michael Landau

Author, Maintainer since 0.0.2 (2021)

Mark Edmondson

Contributor · added in 0.11.0

Matthew T. Warkentin

Contributor

Eli Lilly and Company

Copyright holder, Funder

Tristan Mahr

Reviewer

Samantha Oliver

Reviewer

Listed in earlier versions (2)

Landau

no longer listed · 0.0.2 to 1.12.0

Warkentin

no longer listed · 0.0.2 to 1.12.0

Releases (45)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.12.0Latest
record
2026-02-09 · current release · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
tar_igraph, tar_option_unset
1.11.4
record
2025-09-13 · diff ↗
1.11.3
record
2025-05-08 · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
1.11.1
record
2025-04-10 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
tar_option_with, tar_workspace_download
1.10.1
record
2025-01-31 · diff ↗
1.10.0
record
2025-01-13 · diff ↗
1.9.1
record
2024-12-04 · diff ↗
1.9.0
record
2024-11-20 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
tar_cas_l, tar_unblock_process
1.8.0
record
2024-10-02 · diff ↗ ·
added 8 exports
tar_cas_d, tar_cas_e, tar_cas_u, tar_format_get, tar_repository_cas, tar_repository_cas_local, tar_repository_cas_local_gc, tar_resources_repository_cas
1.7.1
record
2024-06-20 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
1.7.0
record
2024-04-17 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
tar_resources_custom_format
1.6.0
record
2024-03-13 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
tar_described_as
1.5.1
record
2024-02-15 · diff ↗ ·
removed 2 exports
tar_random_name, use_targets_scheduler

added 2 exports
tar_assert_null, tar_message_validate

Show 38 earlier eventsHide 38 earlier events

1.4.1
record
2024-01-09 · diff ↗
1.4.0
record
2023-12-11 · diff ↗ ·
removed 4 exports
tar_as_pipeline, tar_path_objects_dir, tar_path_objects_dir_cloud, tar_pipeline_validate_lite

added 7 exports
tar_completed, tar_condition_traced, tar_dispatched, tar_seed_create, tar_seed_get, tar_seed_set, tar_unversion
1.3.2
record
2023-10-12 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
tar_config_projects, tar_config_yaml
1.3.0
record
2023-09-11 · diff ↗ ·
added 6 exports
tar_meta_delete, tar_meta_download, tar_meta_sync, tar_meta_upload, tar_option_export, tar_print
1.2.2
record
2023-08-10 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
tar_prune_list
1.2.0
record
2023-06-26 · diff ↗
1.1.3
record
2023-05-23 · diff ↗
1.1.2
record
2023-05-23 · diff ↗ ·
added 5 exports
tar_backoff, tar_counter, tar_crew, tar_path_objects_dir, tar_resources_network
1.0.0
record
2023-04-24 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
tar_resources_crew
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
0.14.3
record
2023-03-08 · diff ↗
0.14.2
record
2023-01-06 · diff ↗
0.14.1
record
2022-11-29 · diff ↗
0.14.0
record
2022-11-01 · diff ↗ ·
added 5 exports
tar_debug_instructions, tar_path_script, tar_path_script_support, tar_path_store, tar_path_target
0.13.5
record
2022-09-26 · diff ↗
0.13.4
record
2022-09-15 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
tar_assert_store, tar_callr_inner_try
0.13.1
record
2022-08-05 · diff ↗ ·
removed 3 exports
as_pipeline, path_objects_dir_cloud, pipeline_validate_lite

added 7 exports
tar_as_pipeline, tar_assert_named, tar_callr_args_default, tar_path_objects_dir_cloud, tar_pipeline_validate_lite, tar_random_name, tar_source
0.12.1
record
2022-06-03 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
tar_error, tar_message, tar_warning
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
0.12.0
record
2022-04-19 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
tar_load_everything, use_targets_rmd, use_targets_scheduler
0.11.0
record
2022-03-19 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
tar_assert_finite, tar_mermaid, tar_resources_gcp
0.10.0
record
2022-01-08 · diff ↗ ·
added 5 exports
tar_active, tar_assert_function_arguments, tar_call, tar_format, tar_runtime_object
0.9.0
record
2021-12-04 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
tar_assert_file, tar_reprex, tar_store
0.8.1
record
2021-10-26 · diff ↗
0.8.0
record
2021-09-21 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
tar_config_unset, tar_definition
0.7.0
record
2021-08-20 · diff ↗ ·
added 9 exports
tar_built, tar_canceled, tar_errored, tar_interactive, tar_make_interactive, tar_noninteractive, tar_skipped, tar_started, tar_toggle
0.6.0
record
2021-07-21 · diff ↗ ·
added 67 exports
path_objects_dir_cloud, tar_assert_chr, tar_assert_dbl, tar_assert_df, tar_assert_envir, tar_assert_equal_lengths, tar_assert_expr, tar_assert_flag, tar_assert_function, tar_assert_ge, tar_assert_identical, tar_assert_in, tar_assert_inherits, tar_assert_int, tar_assert_internet, tar_assert_lang, tar_assert_le, tar_assert_lgl, tar_assert_list, tar_assert_match, tar_assert_name, tar_assert_names, tar_assert_nonempty, tar_assert_nonmissing, tar_assert_not_dir, tar_assert_not_dirs, tar_assert_not_expr, tar_assert_not_in, tar_assert_nzchar, tar_assert_package and 37 more
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
unarchivedReturned to CRAN
2021-04-30
0.4.2
record
2021-04-30 · diff ↗
archivedRemoved from CRAN
2021-04-25
check problems were not corrected in time
0.4.1
record
2021-04-22 · diff ↗ ·
added 7 exports
tar_config_get, tar_config_set, tar_envvars, tar_poll, tar_progress_summary, tar_timestamp, tar_timestamp_raw
0.3.1
record
2021-03-28 · diff ↗
0.3.0
record
2021-03-27 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
callr_args_default, tar_github_actions
0.2.0
record
2021-02-27 · diff ↗ ·
added 9 exports
tar_exist_meta, tar_exist_objects, tar_exist_process, tar_exist_progress, tar_exist_script, tar_helper, tar_helper_raw, tar_pid, tar_process
0.1.0
record
2021-02-01 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
tar_progress_branches
0.0.2
record
2021-01-21
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24

Package metadata

First published: 2021-01-21
Total releases: 45 / 5 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.5.0
Download size: 753 KB

Appears in task views

High-Performance and Parallel Computing with R Reproducible Research

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' entry:

citation("targets")

The package provides a citation file, so citation() returns the authors' own entry.

It points to 10.21105/joss.02959.

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 targets version 1.12.0 [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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