This post is part of a series of technotes about r-universe, a new umbrella project by rOpenSci under which we experiment with various ideas for improving publication and discovery of research software in R. As the project evolves, we will post updates to document features and technical details. For more information, visit the r-universe project page.

Running your own package registry

Tiny update for r-universe users whos run their own package registry: we have changed the preferred git repo name where you host your packages.json registry file.

Previously the git repository was simply called universe, i.e. the registry for tiledb-inc.r-universe.dev was in the GitHub repository tiledb-inc/universe. We now recommend to instead use the full lowercase name of your r-universe domain as the repo name, i.e tiledb-inc/tiledb-inc.r-universe.dev.

The old name universe will keep working as well, so this should not break any existing registries, but we recommend renaming it.

Why the change

Why the change? First of all, the old name universe was too generic, which made its purpose sometimes unclear for larger GitHub organizations.

But there was also a potential bug: if you would fork somebody universe repo in order to send them a PR, you would automatically have a git repo named universe under your own GitHub account, and unintentionally start a CRAN-like repo under your own name, but with their packages.

Hence the obvious solution was to use the same format as github-pages, where the name of the repo is simply the full domain name at which your universe is hosted.