CRANextra

trying to fix? the CRANextra warnings when installing packages

If you're here you must have hit by this:

Warning: unable to access index for repository http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin/bin/windows/contrib/4.4: cannot open URL 'http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin/bin/windows/contrib/4.4/PACKAGES'

Some times it's not a warning but even an error.

This is my trial, with the help of deepseek and NOT WITH ANY HELP FROM those "great developers" (#83 #91 #907 #943 etc.)

NOT guarantee 100% fix but worth a try.

0. remember to update.packages()

1. find your user file and profile file (1) .Rprofile: type and execute path.expand("~") in your R console and copy the directory path to the folder address bar, then look for .Rprofile (2) Rprofile.site: type and execute R.home("etc") in your R console and copy the directory path to the folder address bar, then look for Rprofile.site

2. open these two files with notepad txt

3. copy the following scripts, paste to the end of the two files

# fixing the CRANextra warnings when installing packages
# the following two chucks of scripts will/may run from start of R
local({
  r <- getOption("repos")  # Get the current repositories
  r <- r[names(r) != "CRANextra"]  # Remove CRANextra
  options(repos = r)  # Update the repositories
})

# the cloudyr project
# https://cloudyr.github.io/drat/
if (!require("drat")) {
    install.packages("drat")
    library("drat")
    drat::addRepo("cloudyr", "http://cloudyr.github.io/drat") # Add coudyr to repositories
}

4. save and close the two files

5. in the same folder of the Rprofile.site there should be a repositories file, open it and remove the line with "CRANextra", save and close

6. restart your R / R session / Rstudio / whatever

So, I'm just a nobody trying to help other newbees like me who also has little knowlege of these kind of "easy bugs". I'll keep this post open since this CRANextra problem is a zombie and comes back to live from time to time. Please let me know if there's any better way / alternatives, thanks.