Summary and Setup

Chances are that you used R packages before but, did you know you can write your own? Even more, did you know that this can be a brilliant idea? Packaging helps you creating a more robust, more reproducible and more enjoyable scientific coding experience. And who knows?, perhaps you’ll see your package published in CRAN one day!

This workshop will provide you with the basics for writing your own packages in R.

R packages are no more and no less than a standard way of structuring your work. You’ll have a folder for code, a folder for tests, a folder for data, a folder for documents, and so on. The standardization makes packages easily installable and shareable.

Even if you are not planning to publish your package, structuring your research as one is also a very good idea. It enforces, in a relatively effortless manner, the implementation of software development best practices. This will lead to a safer, more robust, more manageable and more enjoyable working experience.

Syllabus

In this lesson you will find episodes on:

  • Introduction to packages
  • Setup of a package
  • Installing packages
  • Testing packages
  • Documenting packages
  • Writing vignettes

Prerequisites

In order to follow this lesson you will need:

  • To be able to understand simple R code.
  • To understand the concept of an R function.

In case you are not familiar with the abovementioned topics, please follow first one of our lessons about R.

Required software

This lesson assumes you have reasonably up-to-date versions of the following software installed on your computer:

Required R Packages

You will also need to install the following R packages:

  • devtools
  • rmarkdown
  • roxygen2

They can be installed by executing the code below in your R console:

R 

install.packages(c("devtools", "rmarkdown", "roxygen2"))