About The Warehouse

What is The Warehouse?

The Warehouse is a function-first R package directory that helps you find packages by what they do, not just by their names.

The Problem

With over 22,000 packages on CRAN alone, finding the right package for your task is overwhelming:

  • Searching by keywords often misses relevant packages
  • No easy way to compare similar packages
  • Quality indicators are scattered or missing
  • GitHub-only packages are hard to discover

Our Solution

The Warehouse provides:

  • Function-first search: “estimate serial interval” → find all relevant packages
  • Quality scores: Automated assessment of tests, documentation, and maintenance
  • All sources: CRAN, GitHub, Bioconductor in one place
  • Community reviews: Real user experiences and recommendations
  • Smart categorization: Browse by what packages actually do

Resources & Credits

The Warehouse doesn’t aim to reinvent the wheel. The R ecosystem already has excellent resources for package discovery and distribution. We build upon these foundations, adding a unified search experience focused on what packages do rather than what they’re called.

Our data sources:

Resource What it provides
R-Universe Package metadata, binaries, and quality metrics for CRAN and GitHub packages
CRAN The official R package repository with 20,000+ packages
Bioconductor Curated packages for bioinformatics and computational biology
rOpenSci Peer-reviewed packages for reproducible research
R Weekly Weekly highlights of new and updated R packages

What The Warehouse adds:

  • Unified search across all sources with AI-powered semantic matching
  • Function-first discovery — search by what you want to do, not package names
  • Curated categories for domain-specific workflows (epidemiology, pharma, geospatial, etc.)
  • Community reviews to share real-world experiences
  • Quality comparisons to help choose between similar packages

We’re grateful to the maintainers of these resources and the broader R community for making package discovery possible.

Quality Scores

Quality scores displayed on packages come from R-Universe, which calculates them based on factors like documentation, testing, dependencies, and maintenance activity.

Learn more about R-Universe scoring →

Open Source & Free

The Warehouse is:

  • ✅ Completely free to use
  • ✅ Open source (MIT license)
  • ✅ Community-driven

Get Involved

Contact

Questions or feedback? Reach out:

The Warehouse is a prototype project demonstrating function-first package discovery for R and beyond.

This website was built with Quarto and created with the help of Claude Code.