managing and caching downloaded files

Package development
1

There is a Bioconductor package BiocFileCache that creates a persistent on-disk cache of files that the user can add, update, and retrieve. I have not been able to find a CRAN alternative. Am I not searching properly? If there really isn't one, why not? Is it really a Bioconductor-specific problem?

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2

See some here:
https://r-pkg.org/search.html?q=cache+files

Or from R:

❯ pkgsearch::pkg_search("cache files")
- "cache files" ------------------------------ 1669 packages in 0.148 seconds -
  #     package      version by                    @ title
  1 100 hoardr       0.5.5   Tamás Stirling       4M Manage Cached Files
  2  58 dlr          1.0.1   Jon Harmon           4y Download and Cache File...
  3  15 fscache      1.0.5   Pierrick Roger       1y File System Cache
  4  11 hfhub        0.1.1   Daniel Falbel        2y Hugging Face Hub Interface
  5   8 zendown      0.1.0   Raphael Saldanha     1y Access Files from 'Zeno...
  6   8 pak          0.8.0.2 Gábor Csárdi        29d Another Approach to Pac...
  7   8 R.cache      0.17.0  Henrik Bengtsson     5d Fast and Light-Weight C...
  8   6 repmis       0.5     Christopher Gandrud  9y Miscellaneous Tools for...
  9   5 reproducible 2.1.2   Eliot J B McIntire   5M Enhance Reproducibility...
 10   4 deSolve      1.40    Thomas Petzoldt      1y Solvers for Initial Val...
2 Likes
3

Those are some interesting options. Only dlr seems to be focused on managing downloads, but it hasn't been updated in 4 years.

Through these, I discovered rappdirs, which seems like the most basic solution and is imported by some very popular packages like reticulate and usethis. Although it looks like you should be switching from rappdirs::user_cache_dir to tools::R_user_dir since R 4.0.