Download RStudio CRAN mirror data files into a folder

This function download these files based on the code from the download page (http://cran-logs.rstudio.com/) into a temporary folder.

download_RStudio_CRAN_data(
  START = as.Date(Sys.time()) - 5,
  END = as.Date(Sys.time()),
  log_folder = tempdir(),
  trunc_END_date_to_today = TRUE,
  override = FALSE,
  message = TRUE,
  ...
)

Arguments

START	the defaults is 5 days before today. A character string of the START date for files to be downloaded. The date format is "YYYY-MM-DD".
END	the defaults is today. A character string of the END date for files to be downloaded. The date format is "YYYY-MM-DD".
log_folder	the folder into which we would like the files to be downloaded to. Default is the temporary folder picked by tempdir.
trunc_END_date_to_today	default is TRUE. Makes sure that if END date is later then today, the END date will be change to today (since otherwise, we will only get many 404 errors)
override	boolean (default is FALSE) - should the function download files that are already available in the temp folder
message	boolean (default is TRUE) - should a message be printed in interesting cases.
...	not in use.

Value

Returns the value of log_folder.

Details

RStudio maintains its own CRAN mirror, https://cran.rstudio.com/ and offers its log files.

See also

download_RStudio_CRAN_data, read_RStudio_CRAN_data,barplot_package_users_per_day

Examples

if (FALSE) {
# The first two functions might take a good deal of time to run (depending on the date range)
RStudio_CRAN_data_folder <- 
      download_RStudio_CRAN_data(START = '2013-04-02',
                                 END = '2013-04-05') 
                                 # around the time R 3.0.0 was released
# RStudio_CRAN_data_folder <- download_RStudio_CRAN_data()
my_RStudio_CRAN_data <- read_RStudio_CRAN_data(RStudio_CRAN_data_folder)

# barplots: (more functions can easily be added in the future)
barplot_package_users_per_day("installr", my_RStudio_CRAN_data)
barplot_package_users_per_day("plyr", my_RStudio_CRAN_data)
}