CRAN R Packages Scraper

Turn any list of CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) package names into clean, structured JSON — version, title, license, author, maintainer, homepage, publish date and last-month download counts — in a single run. No API key, no login, no browser. Datacenter-proxy friendly and fast.

Perfect for data-science teams, R developers, dependency/SBOM tooling and ecosystem analysts who need reliable package intelligence without hand-parsing DESCRIPTION files or the CRAN website.

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What it does

Give it a list of package names (e.g. ggplot2, dplyr, data.table) and it returns one JSON record per package by merging two official, key-less CRAN data sources:

• crandb (crandb.r-pkg.org) — canonical package metadata
• cranlogs (cranlogs.r-pkg.org) — RStudio/Posit CRAN mirror download stats

Example output

{
  "name": "ggplot2",
  "title": "Create Elegant Data Visualisations Using the Grammar of Graphics",
  "version": "4.0.3",
  "description": "A system for 'declaratively' creating graphics, based on \"The Grammar of Graphics\"...",
  "author": "Hadley Wickham [aut], Winston Chang [aut], ...",
  "maintainer": "Thomas Lin Pedersen <thomas.pedersen@posit.co>",
  "license": "MIT + file LICENSE",
  "homepage": "https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org, https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2",
  "downloads_last_month": 2761114,
  "published_date": "2026-04-22 09:10:03 UTC",
  "url": "https://cran.r-project.org/package=ggplot2",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-18T12:00:00+00:00"
}

Every field is nullable — missing values come back as null, never a crash.

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Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	Scrape mode. Currently packages (resolve names to metadata + downloads).
packageNames	array	List of CRAN package names to scrape (case-sensitive).
maxItems	integer	Max packages per run, 1–1000 (default 100).

{
  "mode": "packages",
  "packageNames": ["ggplot2", "dplyr", "data.table"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Unknown package names (HTTP 404) are skipped automatically.

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Output fields

name, title, version, description (capped at 2000 chars), author, maintainer, license, homepage, downloads_last_month, published_date, url, scraped_at.

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Pricing

Pay-as-you-go: roughly $1 per 1,000 packages scraped, plus Apify platform usage. Each package is two lightweight JSON requests, so runs are cheap and fast.

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Use cases

• Data science — snapshot the versions, licenses and popularity of your R toolchain.
• Developer intelligence — monitor download trends and maintainer changes across competitor or dependency packages.
• R ecosystem research — analyze license distribution, publish cadence and adoption across hundreds of packages at once.
• SBOM / compliance — pull license and version data for every R package in your software bill of materials.

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How it compares

	This actor	Manual scraping	GitHub DESCRIPTION
Structured JSON	✅	❌	❌
Download counts	✅	❌	❌
No API key	✅	✅	✅
Datacenter-friendly	✅	⚠️	⚠️
Batch of 1000	✅	❌	❌

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Related actors

• PyPI Scraper
• Anaconda Package Scraper
• npm Package Scraper
• deps.dev Scraper

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Keywords: CRAN scraper, R packages, R package metadata, CRAN downloads, cranlogs, crandb, R ecosystem, package version, R license, dependency intelligence, SBOM, data science tooling, tidyverse, package analytics.