R6

2.6.1

Encapsulated Classes with Reference Semantics

704packages depend

19.9Mdownloads / year

–test coverage

12/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Winston ChangFirst published 2014-07-1717 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Creates classes with reference semantics, similar to R's built-in reference classes. Compared to reference classes, R6 classes are simpler and lighter-weight, and they are not built on S4 classes so they do not require the methods package. These classes allow public and private members, and they support inheritance, even when the classes are defined in different packages.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("R6", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("r-lib/R6")

Development version from r-lib/R6. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-r6

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-R6

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

1ERROR12OK

Failing flavors

ERROR r-oldrel-macos-arm64

Slowest check: 1.0 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Check history

ERROR2026-03-10
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

Documentation signals are not tracked yet for this package.

Downloads

19.9M

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #12 · ~54.6K/day · ~1.7M/mo

R6 Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

1.7M30 days

5.2M90 days

19.9M1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on190.9K r2u122 autocran1.7M conda_forge3.8K c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ r-lib/r6

425Stars

59Forks

53Open issues

3Open PRs

4Releases

601Commits

20Contributors

601 commits · Last activity 2025-10-20 · +0.2% stars, 30d

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

5 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 5 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/r-lib/r6 on 2026-07-19.

Continuous integration (1)

GitHub Actions

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

Coverage (1)

Codecov

Governance and community (1)

CODEOWNERS

Show all practices

Git structural (1)

.gitattributes

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

2 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (1)

R >= 3.6

Imports (0)

none

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (2)

lobstr testthat

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

704direct

11,105indirect

and 656 more packages.

Code & Tests

People & History

People (2)

Maintainer (1)

Winston Chang

Author, Maintainer

Authors (1)

Winston Chang

Author, Maintainer

Posit Software, PBC

Funders (1)

Posit Software, PBC

Package Timeline

17 releases. R releases are shown for context.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
2.6.1Latest
2025-02-15 · current release · diff ↗
2.6.0
2025-02-12 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
2.5.1
2021-08-19 · diff ↗
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
2.5.0
2020-10-28 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
2.4.1
2019-11-12 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
2.4.0
2019-02-14 · diff ↗
2.3.0
2018-10-04 · diff ↗
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23

Show 14 earlier events

2.2.2
2017-06-17 · diff ↗
2.2.1
2017-05-10 · diff ↗
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
2.2.0
2016-10-05 · diff ↗
2.1.3
2016-08-19 · diff ↗
R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
2.1.2
2016-01-26 · diff ↗
2.1.1
2015-08-19 · diff ↗
2.1.0
2015-07-04 · diff ↗
R
R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16
2.0.1
2014-10-29 · diff ↗
2.0
2014-08-19 · diff ↗
1.0.1
2014-07-17
R
R 3.1.0 released · 2014-04-10

Package metadata

First published: 2014-07-17
Total releases: 17 / 12 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Download size: 63 KB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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