My R-Package Development Cheat Sheet

In case you have no experience in writing an R-package yourself  but would like to start developing one right away, this post might be helpful.

I'm about to finish my first own (serious) R-package these days (more on the package itself later). While writing my package, I collected a handful of commands and notes etc. that proofed to be helpful, and saved them in a R-script. I usually had that script open in one window when writing/testing some parts of my package in RStudio. I figured that it might help someone in a similar situation. Note, though, that this little code collection has no ambitions whatsoever to be anything like a complete guide to develop your own R-package. Having that said, here it is (you can also download it from my github repo):

#######################################################
# This was contributed by giventhedata.blogspot.com   #
#######################################################
 
 
# I. Very useful tools when writing a R-package:
#------------------------------------------------
install.packages("devtools", "roxygen2")
library(devtools)
library(roxygen2)
 
 
# II. getting started
#--------------------
 
# assuming your package is to be called 'MyRpackage' and
# all the scripts that contain functions that should be part
# of your package are in your current working directory and
# and there are no functions loaded in the workspace of your 
# current R-session...
 
# source all scripts:
myscripts <- c("script1.R", "script2.R", "script3.R") #...
 
for (i in myscripts) source(i)
 
 
# get all the names of the functions in the workspace
fs <- c(lsf.str()) 
 
# create package skeleton:
package.skeleton("MyRpackage", fs)
 
 
# III. While working on your package...
#--------------------------------------
 
# renew documentation
MyRpackage_package <- as.package("MyRpackage")
document(MyRpackage_package)
 
# build and check
system("R CMD build MyRpackage")
system("R CMD check MyRpackage")
system("R CMD Rd2pdf MyRpackage") # update/check manual.pdf (while working on the documentation)
 
# install your package from the local directory after successfully building it
install.packages(paste(getwd(),"/MyRpackage_0.1.tar.gz",sep=""), repos=NULL, type="source")
 
# load it for tests
library(MyRpackage)
 
# unload old version of package after changes (in order to install new built)
detach(package:MyRpackage, unload=TRUE)
 
 
#Note:
# For internal functions: delete Rd-file, leave out export-command in Namespace

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