The Big R-Book

♣A♣Create your own R Package

package creation

While this book focuses on the work-flow of the data scientist and it is not a programming book per se; it still makes a lot of sense to introducing you to building your own package. A package is an ideal solution to keep together the functions and data that you need regularly for specific tasks. Of course, it is possible to keep these functions in a file that can be read in via the function source(), but having it all in a package has the advantage of being more standardized, structured and easier to document and so it becomes more portable so that also others can use your code. Eventually, if you have built something great and unique then it might be worth to share it via the “Comprehensive R Archive Network” (CRAN).¹

package

source()

Further information – More on creating packages

This chapter provides only a quick introduction. More information can be found online, for example http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz, which is the website version of Hadley Wickham’s book “R-Packages”—see Wickham (2015).

Before we can get started, we need to install two packages first: devtools – that provides the essentials to build the package – and roxygen – that facilitates the documentation. This is done as follows:

devtools roxygen

install.packages(“devtools”)
install.packages(“roxygen2”)

devtools is the package that is the workhorse ...