R Observatory: Metrics for urlchecker version 2.0.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

urlchecker

2.0.0Package record

Run CRAN URL Checks from Older R Versions

3packages dependsuggested by 3

1.8Mdownloads / year

90.3%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Gábor CsárdiCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗Declared funder: Posit Software, PBC

Provide the URL checking tools available in R 4.1+ as a package for earlier versions of R. Also uses concurrent requests so can be much faster than the serial versions.

Changes in 2.0.0

url_check() now ignores the same HTTP status codes that CRAN ignores in its incoming URL checks: 202, 401, 403, and 429. This makes results match what CRAN reports and avoids false positives from servers that return. Set the _R_CHECK_URLS_HTTP_STATUS_IGNORE_REGEXP_ environment variable to override it.
url_check() now sends the same browser-like User-Agent header that CRAN uses for its URL checks. Set the _R_CHECK_URLS_CURL_USER_AGENT_ environment variable to override it (#26).
url_check() no longer reports URLs that appear inside code chunks of .Rmd vignettes (#50).
url_check() now reads an optional .urlignore file (from the project root or from tools/). URLs matching its glob patterns are skipped and never requested, which is useful for links to private repositories or pages behind a login or captcha (#45).

Show all changes in 2.0.0Hide the rest of the changes in 2.0.0

The url_check() report no longer errors when a flagged URL is empty (e.g. a Markdown []() link); the empty URL is now reported without a source-line pointer (#47).
url_check() now checks URLs in BibTeX (.bib) bibliography files (#13).
url_check() now finds a GitHub token in the git credential store (via gitcreds, as configured by usethis or gh), in addition to the GITHUB_PAT environment variable. This lets checks of github.com URLs avoid the 429: Too Many Requests errors that anonymous requests hit (#28).
url_check() gains a fail argument. When TRUE (the default) it throws an error after printing the report if any URLs are flagged, yielding a non-zero exit status for CI/CD workflows. Set fail = FALSE to return the results instead (#42).
The url_check() report now prints the file:line:col location of each flagged URL as a clickable hyperlink, so you can jump straight to the problem in supporting IDEs and terminals (#23).
url_check() now also works on non-package projects. path may be a directory that is not an R package (all supported files within are scanned), a single file, or a character vector mixing packages, directories and files. Supported file types are HTML, PDF, Rd, Markdown (.md, .markdown), R Markdown (.Rmd) and Quarto (.qmd).
url_check() now also checks URLs in Quarto (.qmd) vignettes, rendering them with quarto (the un-evaluated document, in the same way .Rmd vignettes are rendered with pandoc).
url_check() now errors if a VignetteBuilder package listed in the DESCRIPTION is not installed, as it is needed to render the vignettes for URL checking.
url_check() now errors, instead of silently skipping the file, when pandoc (for .md/.Rmd files) or quarto (for .qmd files) is needed to render a file but cannot be found on the PATH.
Handle URL fragments in redirects (#9).
url_check() now also handles package tarballs. This is useful to check the URL in the package vignettes.

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

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

install.packages("urlchecker", 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/urlchecker")

Development version from r-lib/urlchecker. 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-urlchecker

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-urlchecker

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-urlchecker

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: 1.2 min · r-oldrel-macos-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-04
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-07-09
NOTE12 OK, 2 NOTE2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 2.0.0

READMEYes · 259 wordsVignettesNoNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 2.0.0Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 3 (1 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 0%2 never run
Exported functions with examples: 100%
Documented parameters: 83%
Return-value docs: 100%
Help pages citing references: 0%

How these are measured

Downloads

1.8M

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #274 · ~5K/day · ~150.6K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

127.7K30 days

428.1K90 days

1.8M1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on111.5K r2u2 autocran207.6K conda_forge

How downloads are counted

Repository

r-lib/urlchecker ↗Organization: r-lib

45Stars

7Forks

1Open issues

0Open PRs

3Releases

132Commits

8Commit identities

License file reads as GPL-3.0 · 132 commits · Last activity 2026-07-09 · 0% stars, 30d · Default branch at 2.0.0.9000, ahead of CRAN 2.0.0 (checked 2026-10-18)

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 88%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 297
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Stars over time

2024-09-11 · 442026-07-07 · 45

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

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

Checks run against github.com/r-lib/urlchecker on 2026-10-18.

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 2026-07-09 · The repository has a site deploy workflow

pkgdown site last built 2026-07-09

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting (Codecov)

Show all practicesHide 2 practices

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

Lint, format, editor (4)

Lint workflowAirVS CodeRStudio project

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

AI coding toolsBeta

This repository shows signs of AI coding tools.

Claude Codefirst seen 2026-07-07
Seen in the repository: CLAUDE.md
Named in .Rbuildignore: CLAUDE.md

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

9 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing urlchecker adds 5 packages (4 with compiled code, 2.3 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: rlang 766 KB, curl 714 KB, cli 629 KB.

Depends (1)

R >= 4.1

Imports (7)

cli curl gitcreds rlangtoolsutilsxml2

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (4)

covr testthat webfakes withr

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

3direct

75indirect

Imports 3

Suggested by 3

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

devtools goodpractice sketchy

Suggests, most downloaded first

bluertopo shiny.webawesome swelex

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (4)

Gábor Csárdi

Author, Maintainer since 1.0.1 (2021) · added in 1.0.1

R Core team

Author

The code in urltools.R adapted from the tools package

Jim Hester

Author

Posit Software, PBC

Copyright holder, Funder · added in 2.0.0

Previously maintained by Jim Hester (1.0.0).

Listed in earlier versions (1)

RStudio

no longer listed · 1.0.0 to 1.0.1

Releases (3)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

2.0.0Latest
record
2026-07-08 · current release · diff ↗
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
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
1.0.1
record
2021-11-30 · diff ↗
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
1.0.0
record
2021-03-04
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24

Package metadata

First published: 2021-03-04
Total releases: 3 / 5 yrs
License: GPL-3 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 4.1
Download size: 38 KB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("urlchecker")

Format

Csárdi, G., Posit Software, PBC, R Core team, & Hester, J. (2026). urlchecker: Run CRAN URL Checks from Older R Versions (Version 2.0.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.urlchecker

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 urlchecker version 2.0.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-20. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-20, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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