R package development and pkgdown

Introduction to building and documenting R packages

Author

Affiliation

Stephanie Hicks

Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins

Pre-lecture activities

Important

In advance of class, please install two additional packages:

• devtools - this provides many additional tools for building packages
• roxygen2 - this provides tools for writing documentation
• pkgdown - this helps you to build a package website with little effort
• usethis - an automation package that simplifies project creation and setup

You can do this by calling

install.packages(c("devtools", "roxygen2",
                   "usethis", "pkgdown"))

In addition, please read through:

• https://r-pkgs.org
• https://stat545.com/package-overview
• https://usethis.r-lib.org
• https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/articles/pkgdown

Lecture

Acknowledgements

Material for this lecture was borrowed and adopted from

• https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/index.html
• https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/pkgdown-components.html

Learning objectives

Learning objectives

At the end of this lesson you will:

• Create an empty R package
• Design a R function and write documentation
• Describe what a DESCRIPTION file is and what goes in it
• Be able to build and install a R package
• Build a website for your package

Slides

• Lecture 09: R package development