Create an R Package

December 20 2022

R package reference materials

Some reassurance!

First, here are some talks about how easy this is from rstudio::global 2021:

• Make a package - Make some friends
• You’re Already Ready: Zen and the Art of R Package Development

Creating an R Package

You’ll find a guide on how to create an R package linked to GitHub in RStudio in a guide on this website.

Other reference material

The R Packages book is a good resource covering all aspects of writing packages in R.

During this course, we recommend using tools in RStudio and the usethis package for easy package development. In doing so, a standard package structure is automatically generated for you. Here are some links that might be useful:

• .gitignore: contains regular expressions that should be ignored by Git, more info here
• .Rbuildignore: contains regular expressions that should be ignored by R CMD check / when building the package from source, more info here
• demo/: contains R demo files, more info here (which we’ve populated with d0105_run_birth_death.R, the script from Practical 1-5)
• DESCRIPTION: contains metadata about your package, more info here
• man/: contains code used to generate documentation when the package is built (don’t edit these files, this process will be automated), more info here
• NAMESPACE: contains the names of imported and exported functions (don’t edit this file either), more info here
• R/: contains code used to generate functions when the package is built (which we’ve populated with step_deterministic_birth_death.R, the step function from Practical 1-5), more info here
• README.md: contains markdown used to generate your GitHub repository readme page, more info here
• githubusername.Rproj: an RStudio project file, which is used to make this directory an RStudio project, and can be used as a shortcut for opening this project from your filesystem, more info here