March 2015
Intermediate to advanced
202 pages
4h 23m
English
Content preview from R Packages
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Chapter 4. Package Metadata
The job of the DESCRIPTION file is to store important metadata about your package. When you first start writing packages, you’ll just use this metadata to record what packages are needed to run your package. However, as time goes by and you start sharing your package with others, the metadata file becomes increasingly important because it specifies who can use it (the license) and whom to contact (you!) if there are any problems.
Every package must have a DESCRIPTION. In fact, it’s the defining feature of a package (RStudio and devtools consider any directory containing DESCRIPTION to be a package). To get you started, devtools::create("mypackage") automatically adds a bare-bones description file. This allows you to start writing the package without having to worry about the metadata until you need to. The minimal description will vary a bit depending on your settings, but should look something like this:
Package: mypackage
Title: What The Package Does (one line, title case required)
Version: 0.1
Authors@R: person("First", "Last", email = "first.last@example.com",
role = c("aut", "cre"))
Description: What the package does (one paragraph)
Depends: R (>= 3.1.0)
License: What license is it under?
LazyData: true
(If you’re writing a lot of packages, you can set global options via devtools.desc.author, devtools.desc.license, devtools.desc.suggests, and devtools.desc. See package?devtools for more details.)
DESCRIPTION uses a simple file format called the ...