R’s open-source communities have built robust package-frameworks that “just work.”” CRAN is a well-celebrated example; devtools makes it easier for us to install and develop packages using public GitHub repositories. RStudio Connect and its underlying packages, rsconnect and packrat, work intuitively if all the packages you use are on either CRAN or public GitHub.
However, if you are working in a corporate environment to develop private packages, this may no longer be the case. I present a set of workarounds that work well for me: using devtools and usethis to develop and deploy packages on GitHub Enterprise, and using drat to maintain a CRAN-like repository within our firewall.
These workarounds are distilled into a new package: ghentr, whose goal is to make it easier for you to build and share a private package-ecosystem using your instance of GitHub Enterprise.
Ian Lyttle works at Schneider Electric as a data scientist, with a focus on visualization. He is an enthusiastic user of, and occasional contributor to, the Tidyverse.
