Simple Implementation of Semantic Versioning (SemVer)

Simple implementation of Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 ('SemVer') on the 'vctrs' package. This package provides a simple way to create, compare, and manipulate semantic versions in R. It is designed to be lightweight and easy to use.

smvr

Simple implementation of Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 on R.

smvr provides a lightweight, fully vectorized R class for Semantic Versioning. It enables type-safe manipulation, comparison, and sorting of version numbers, and integrates smoothly with tidyverse tools.

Installation

Install the latest release version from CRAN:

install.packages("smvr")

The development version can be installed from GitHub:

pak::pak("eitsupi/smvr")

Example

library(smvr)

# Parse version characters into smvr objects
v <- parse_semver(c("1.0.0", "1.0.0-alpha.2", "1.0.0-alpha.10", "1.0.1+20250621", "0.9.0"))

# Sort versions
sort(v)
#> <smvr[5]>
#> [1] 0.9.0          1.0.0-alpha.2  1.0.0-alpha.10 1.0.0          1.0.1+20250621

# Can compare with string notation
v["1.0.0-alpha" < v & v < "1.0.0"]
#> <smvr[2]>
#> [1] 1.0.0-alpha.2  1.0.0-alpha.10

# Works with tibble data frame and dplyr
tibble::tibble(version = v) |>
  dplyr::arrange(version) |>
  dplyr::mutate(
    `>= 1.0.0` = version >= "1.0.0",
    `pre-release` = is_pre_release(version),
  )
#> # A tibble: 5 × 3
#>          version `>= 1.0.0` `pre-release`
#>           <smvr> <lgl>      <lgl>        
#> 1          0.9.0 FALSE      FALSE        
#> 2  1.0.0-alpha.2 FALSE      TRUE         
#> 3 1.0.0-alpha.10 FALSE      TRUE         
#> 4          1.0.0 TRUE       FALSE        
#> 5 1.0.1+20250621 TRUE       FALSE

Features

• Fully vectorized Semantic Versioning class.
• Type-safe comparison and sorting.
• Tidyverse compatibility ({tibble}, {dplyr}, etc.).
• No dependencies except {vctrs}.

Related Works

• The numeric version class vector can be crated with numeric_version() in base R works well for versions that only have MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. But it does not support pre-release identifiers of SemVer, so in the case of including pre-release versions, it is not suitable.
• The semver package is a wrapper for a C++ SemVer parser. The class provided by this package is a special list, which does not work well with {tibble} and {dplyr}.
• The semverutils package has a SemVer parser written in R. It creates a single version as an {R6} object, which is not vectorized. Also, at the moment (version 0.1.0, published 2020-02-22 on CRAN), it has a bug in comparing pre-release versions^1, so it does not work correctly.