The R Journal: Changes on CRAN

Kurt Hornik; Uwe Ligges; Achim Zeileis

1 CRAN growth

In the past 6 months, 1992 new packages were added to the CRAN package repository. 462 packages were unarchived, 1273 were archived and 1 had to be removed. The following shows the growth of the number of active packages in the CRAN package repository:

CRAN growth: Number of CRAN packages over time in levels (left) and in logs (right).

On 2026-06-30, the number of active packages was around 24105.

2 CRAN package submissions

From January 2026 to June 2026 CRAN received 18293 package submissions. For these, 30170 actions took place of which 21673 (72%) were auto processed actions and 8497 (28%) manual actions.

Minus some special cases, a summary of the auto-processed and manually triggered actions follows:

	archive	inspect	newbies	pending	pretest	publish	recheck	waiting
auto	5153	1553	5275	312	0	5738	1983	798
manual	3270	3	57	49	145	4051	642	256

These include the final decisions for the submissions which were

	archive	publish
auto	4836 (27.1%)	5208 (29.2%)
manual	3244 (18.2%)	4558 (25.5%)

where we only count those as auto processed whose publication or rejection happened automatically in all steps.

3 CRAN mirror security

Currently, there are 88 official CRAN mirrors, 72 of which provide both secure downloads via ‘https’ and use secure mirroring from the CRAN master (via rsync through ssh tunnels). Since the R 3.4.0 release, chooseCRANmirror() offers these mirrors in preference to the others which are not fully secured (yet).

4 CRAN Task View Initiative

Currently, there are 49 task views (see https://CRAN.R-project.org/web/views/), with median and mean numbers of CRAN packages covered 108 and 123, respectively. Overall, these task views cover 4996 CRAN packages, which is about 21% of all active CRAN packages.

Reuse

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Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Hornik, et al., "The R Journal: Changes on CRAN", The R Journal, 2026

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2026-2-cran,
  author = {Hornik, Kurt and Ligges, Uwe and Zeileis, Achim},
  title = {The R Journal: Changes on CRAN},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2026},
  note = {https://journal.r-project.org/news/RJ-2026-2-cran},
  volume = {18},
  issue = {2},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {299-300}
}