cowplot

Overview

About

Maintained by Claus O. WilkeFirst published 2015-06-0321 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Provides various features that help with creating publication-quality figures with 'ggplot2', such as a set of themes, functions to align plots and arrange them into complex compound figures, and functions that make it easy to annotate plots and or mix plots with images. The package was originally written for internal use in the Wilke lab, hence the name (Claus O. Wilke's plot package). It has also been used extensively in the book Fundamentals of Data Visualization.

Install

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

install.packages("cowplot", 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("wilkelab/cowplot")

Development version from wilkelab/cowplot. 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-cowplot

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

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-cowplot

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# 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-cowplot

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

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 4.0 min · r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang

Code health

Yes

Tests · ratio 1.72

68.7%

Coverage · measured lines

100%

Documentation · exports

7

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-05-17
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-05-10
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMEYes · 162 wordsVignettesYes · dynamicpkgdown siteNoNEWSYes · 100% structuredCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 96%
Documented parameters: 91%
Return-value docs: 19%
References docs: 0%

Downloads

4.6M

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #170 · ~12.7K/day · ~385.6K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

311.1K30 days

1.1M90 days

4.6M1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on50.6K r2u169 autocran256K conda_forge1.8K c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ wilkelab/cowplot

756Stars

85Forks

36Open issues

2Open PRs

18Releases

429Commits

19Contributors

429 commits · Last activity 2025-07-07 · +0.1% stars, 30d

Stars over time

2025-07-11 · 7262026-07-07 · 756

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

5 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 4 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/wilkelab/cowplot on 2026-07-19.

Continuous integration (1)

GitHub Actions

CRAN release process (2)

cran-comments.mdrevdep/

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

Coverage (1)

Codecov

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

20 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (1)

R >= 3.5.0

Imports (7)

ggplot2gridgtablegrDevicesmethodsrlang scales

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (17)

Cairo covr dplyr forcats gridGraphics knitrlatticemagick maps PASWR patchwork rmarkdown ragg testthat tidyr vdiffr VennDiagram

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

356direct

911indirect

and 308 more packages.

Code & Tests

Code Composition

R 3,519 (62%)Rd 2,042 (36%)Vignettes 98 (2%)

Code characteristics

Object systems

S312

Cyclomatic complexity: 2.0 median / 20 max
Test cases: 19 / 1.72 per code line

Test coverage

Line coverage

69%

Expression

53.0%

Tests / Examples

68.7% / – ex

Functions

70 54 exported

Complexity

2.8 avg / 20 max

Call network

70 nodes / 54 edges

Call graph

Open call graph →

Loading call graph…

Lowest coverage

70 functions

Function	Cyclo	Coverage
add_sub exp	4	0%
agg_null_device exp	2	0%
axis_canvas exp	2	0%
cairo_null_device exp	2	0%
draw_figure_label exp	3	0%
draw_label exp	2	0%

People & History

People (1)

Maintainer (1)

Claus O. Wilke

Author, Maintainer

Authors (1)

Claus O. Wilke

Author, Maintainer

Listed in earlier versions (2)

Hadley Wickham

no longer listed · 0.3.0 to 0.7.0

RStudio

no longer listed · 0.8.0 to 0.9.4

Package Timeline

21 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.2.0Latest
2025-07-07 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
1.1.3
2024-01-23 · diff ↗
1.1.2
2023-12-15 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
1.1.1
2020-12-30 · diff ↗
1.1.0
2020-09-08 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
1.0.0
2019-07-11 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.9.4
2019-01-08 · diff ↗
0.9.3
2018-07-15 · diff ↗

Show 17 earlier events

R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
0.9.2
2017-12-17 · diff ↗
0.9.1
2017-11-16 · diff ↗
0.9.0
2017-11-16 · diff ↗
0.8.0
2017-07-30 · diff ↗
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
0.7.0
2016-10-28 · diff ↗
0.6.3
2016-09-30 · diff ↗
R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
0.6.2
2016-04-20 · diff ↗
0.6.1
2016-03-06 · diff ↗
0.6.0
2015-12-19 · diff ↗
0.5.0
2015-07-01 · diff ↗
0.4.0
2015-06-14 · diff ↗
0.3.1
2015-06-04 · diff ↗
0.3.0
2015-06-03
R
R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16

Package metadata

First published: 2015-06-03
Total releases: 21 / 11 yrs
License: GPL-2 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.5.0
Download size: 1.6 MB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet