uscogdata

Curated R reader for the Civilytics US Census of Governments finance corpus.

Provides unit-level financial profiles, geographic rollups, and peer comparisons with auditable provenance and built-in cross-vintage correctness. Reads the published corpus (Hive-partitioned parquet + manifest.json) directly from Nextcloud via DuckDB httpfs — no local bulk downloads required.

Status

Under active development (Phase 2 of the cog_pipeline project). See ../cog_pipeline/docs/reader-specification.md for the reader contract this package implements.

Installation

# pak::pkg_install("gitea.civilytics.org/Civilytics/uscogdata")

Configuration

• USCOGDATA_URL — corpus root URL (public Nextcloud share, trailing slash)
• USCOGDATA_CACHE_DIR — optional override for the manifest cache directory
• USCOGDATA_MANIFEST_TTL_SECS — optional manifest re-fetch TTL (default 3600)

Developer notes

Testing

The package ships a bundled fixture corpus at inst/extdata/fixture_corpus/ — a 3.6 MB two-year slice (2019 + 2020) of the full corpus covering all 50 states. tests/testthat/setup.R automatically points USCOGDATA_URL at this fixture, so the full test suite runs offline with no network dependency:

devtools::test()   # uses bundled fixture, no credentials required

Releasing against the live corpus

Before cutting a release, run the test suite against the published corpus to catch any drift between the fixture and the real data:

Sys.setenv(USCOGDATA_URL = "<published-corpus-url-with-trailing-slash>")
devtools::test()

When the live-corpus run is clean, strip the fixture from the built package by adding this line to .Rbuildignore:

^inst/extdata/fixture_corpus$

The test suite is URL-agnostic — setup.R falls back to USCOGDATA_URL when the bundled fixture is absent, so no test code changes are needed for the release run or after stripping the fixture.