README.md

In fditraglia/frankmisc: Miscellaneous helpful functions that I use regularly

frankmisc

An R package containing miscellaneous functions that I use all the time.

This is my first attempt to create an R package after many shameful years spent cutting and pasting. This is still a work in progress since I'm still a beginner at creating R packages, but it's not as difficult as I thought it would be.

References

I was inspired to try this out after reading a post on Hilary Parker's blog. Two other valuable resources for R package creation are Hadley Wickham's Advanced R Programming and the documentation for roxygen2. One of these days I'm going to get around to reading the definitive documentation contained in Writing R Extensions.

Package Workflow

The basic workflow for creating and updating a package is as follows. If they're not installed already, install the packages devtools and roxygen2 and then load them

install.packages("devtools")
library("devtools")
devtools::install_github("klutometis/roxygen")
library(roxygen2)

To create a new package in a new directory do the following:

setwd("parent_directory")
create("your_package_here")

This creates a number of files and directories. One of them is the R directory. Put your R code here, and see the roxygen2 help files for how to add documentation comments. To process the documentation, go to the package directory and run the command document()

setwd("./your_package_here")
document()

To install the package, go the the parent directory and use the install command

setwd("parent_directory")
install("your_package_here")

To install directly from a Github repo, do the following:

install_github("your_package_here", "github_username")

For example, to install frankmisc make sure that devtools is loaded and then run

install_github("frankmisc", "fditraglia")

Finally, use library as per usual to load the package.

library(frankmisc)

Mistakes I've made and things I'm still figuring out

I initially failed to include an @export statement in the roxygen2 documentation comments. Without this, everything still worked when installed locally, but when I tried to install from Github I could only view the documentation: the functions themselves couldn't be found.

Later on, I encountered this error when trying to view documentation after installing from Github

Error in fetch(key) : lazy-load database '�' is corrupt

It seems that the solution is simply to restart R. According to Hadley "you'll need to restart R after invocations of install."

fditraglia/frankmisc documentation built on May 16, 2019, 12:11 p.m.