R Packages

Chapter 11. Installed Files

When a package is installed, everything in inst/ is copied into the top-level package directory. In some sense inst/ is the opposite of .Rbuildignore—where .Rbuildignore lets you remove arbitrary files and directories to the top level, inst/ lets you add them. You are free to put anything you like in inst/ with one caution: because inst/ is copied into the top-level directory, you should never use a subdirectory with the same name as an existing directory. This means that you should avoid inst/build, inst/data, inst/demo, inst/exec, inst/help, inst/html, inst/inst, inst/libs, inst/Meta, inst/man, inst/po, inst/R, inst/src, inst/tests, inst/tools, and inst/vignettes.

This chapter discusses the most common files found in inst/:

• inst/AUTHOR and inst/COPYRIGHT: If the copyright and authorship of a package is particularly complex, you can use plain-text files inst/COPYRIGHTS and inst/AUTHORS to provide more information.

• inst/CITATION: How to cite the package, see “Package Citation” for details.

• inst/docs: This is an older convention for vignettes, and should be avoided in modern packages.

• inst/extdata: Additional external data for examples and vignettes. See “Raw Data” for more detail.

• inst/java, inst/python, etc.: See “Other Languages”.

To find a file in inst/ from code use system.file(). For example, to find inst/extdata/mydata.csv, you’d call system.file("extdata", "mydata.csv", package = "mypackage"). Note that you omit the inst/ directory ...