R in a Nutshell

Custom Packages

Building your own packages is a good idea if you want to share code or data with other people, or if you just want to pack it up in a form that’s easy to reuse, you should consider building your own package. This section explains the easy way to create your own packages.

Creating a Package Directory

To build a package, you need to place all of the package files (code, data, documentation, etc.) inside a single directory. You can create an appropriate directory structure using the R function package.skeleton:

package.skeleton(name = "anRpackage", list,
                 environment = .GlobalEnv,
                 path = ".", force = FALSE, namespace = FALSE,
                 code_files = character())

This function can also copy a set of R objects into that directory. Here’s a description of the arguments to package.skeleton.

Argument	Description	Default
name	A character value specifying a name for the new package	“anRpackage” (as a side note, this may be the least useful default value for any R function)
list	A character vector containing names of R objects to add to the package
environment	The environment in which to evaluate list	.GlobalEnv
path	A character vector specifying the path in the file system	“.”
force	A Boolean value specifying whether to overwrite files, if a directory name already exists at path	FALSE
namespace	A Boolean value specifying whether to add a namespace to the package	FALSE
code_files	A character vector specifying the paths of files containing R code	character()

For this book, I created a package called nutshell containing ...