ropensci/drake

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1342 stars · 129 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

drake is an R package that acts as a Make-like pipeline toolkit for data science workflows, analyzing dependencies, skipping up-to-date steps, and orchestrating the rest with optional parallel/distributed computing. It is officially superseded by the targets package, though it still receives occasional CRAN compatibility releases.

Use cases

• skip already-computed steps in a long R data analysis pipeline
• make my R research results reproducible and traceable to code and data
• run R workflow steps in parallel on an HPC cluster like SLURM
• avoid rerunning an entire analysis when only one script changes
• orchestrate a multi-step data science project with dependencies
• prove my published results match the underlying code and data

When to choose

• you are maintaining or extending an existing drake-based project
• you need a Make-style incremental pipeline in R and cannot migrate yet

When to avoid

• you are starting a new R pipeline project - use the targets successor instead
• you need workflows outside the R ecosystem
• you expect active feature development or new capabilities

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

workflow-automation etl developer-tools data-science developer-tools cli cross-platform r-package pipeline-toolkit make-like high-performance-computing superseded ropensci automation reproducibility r

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