Setting up Rstudio package manager with Nexus & Firewall

Sonatype Nexus Repository
1

Hi all,

Is there anyone already with experience setting up RStudio package manager with nexus & firewall?

Rstudio package manager can’t connect directly to an R / Pypi-repo but instead uses their own repository which proxies CRAN, Pypi,…
Repositories and Sources - RStudio Package Manager: Admin Guide

RStudio Package Manager doesn’t download packages directly from CRAN, Bioconductor, or PyPI. Instead, RStudio maintains a curated S3 bucket that contains metadata about CRAN, Bioconductor, and PyPI, in addition to package tar files. The metadata is used to track day-to-day changes.

RStudio recommends setting up a “raw proxy” to integrate with nexus, however with a raw proxy we won’t have artefact analysis with firewall so it’s not really a good option. RStudio Package Manager and Nexus – RStudio Support

Other options we’re considering;

  • have R clients talk directly to Nexus instead of Rstudio package manager - then the team loses the snapshot functionality from rstudio package manager which they require
  • modify the reverse proxy in front of Nexus to allow some of the meta-data from rspm-repo

I’m not sure if someone already has a similar experience or any solutions we could consider?

Kind regards,
Joris

2

I have no experience with the R ecosystem, but I was wondering if you could use bspm instead of rspm since it leverages the system package manager. Both bspm and Nexus support the apt package manager. Perhaps you could proxy apt repositories with Nexus Firewall and point bspm at your proxy.