R Packages, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. System Setup

To get started, make sure you have the latest version of R (at least 4.2.2, which is the version being used to render this book), then run the following code to get the packages you’ll need:

install.packages(c("devtools", "roxygen2", "testthat", "knitr"))

Make sure you have a recent version of the RStudio integrated development environment (IDE). New versions are released regularly, so we recommend updating often to get access to the latest and greatest features.

Download the current version of RStudio Desktop. Most readers can use the free, open source version of RStudio Desktop.

devtools, usethis, and You

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

As mentioned in “Philosophy”, devtools is a “metapackage,” encompassing and exposing functionality maintained in several smaller packages.¹ For example, devtools might provide a wrapper function in order to set user-friendly defaults, introduce helpful interactive behavior, or to combine functionality from multiple subpackages. In some cases it simply re-exports a function from another package to make it easily available when devtools is attached.

What’s our recommended approach to using devtools and its constituent packages? It varies, depending on your intention:

• If you are using the functions interactively to help you develop your package, you should think of devtools as the provider of your favorite functions for package development. In this case you should attach devtools with ...