Jetpack’s goal is to make dependency management in R as easy as it is with Ruby’s Bundler and JavaScript’s Yarn package managers Credit: Thinkstock The new open source Jetpack package manager promises to make it easier to manage project dependences for code written in the R language. Jetpack provides a way to specify project dependencies in a single file and enables project collaboration. When other collaborators pull the latest version of code, they run jetpack install to have all dependencies installed on their PC. This process makes it easy to forge a reproducible environment. Jetpack also uses the Packrat dependency management system for R to set up a virtual environment. Jetpack’s goal is to make dependency management in R as easy as it is with Ruby’s Bundler and JavaScript’s Yarn package managers, says creator Andrew Kane. Jetpack is similar to NPM, the popular JavaScript package manager, in its ability to write project dependencies to a file but differs in that NPM also performs dependency resolution. Dependency resolution must be done manually with Jetpack. NPM also has its own module registry, while Jetpack uses the CRAN registry for R packages. Where to download Jetpack You can download Jetpack from GitHub. Software DevelopmentR Language