doc/project_dependencies.md

In richfitz/remake: Make-like build management

Managing project dependencies

NOTE: This is subject to change.

Dealing with project dependencies is a pain. Telling other people how to deal with your project's dependencies is even more of a pain. Projects like packrat provide an extremely thorough solution to this problem and manage package versions, from diverse locations, keeping projects isolated from one another. Remake will probably eventually use this. In the mean time, it provides a lightweight automated dependency installation system.

Your remakefile already lists required packages in the packages: section. From this, remake can arrange to install all missing packages by running

remake::make(install_packages")

This skips over packages that are already installed and does not enforce any version information. This works without modification if all packages are available on CRAN.

If you depend on packages from GitHub or BitBucket, you can provide a little more metadata so that this works. In another file called remake_packages.yml you can include sections like:

sowsear:
  source: github
  repo: richfitz/sowsear

The top level key is the package name. The key source: can be github, bitbucket, git or url, corresponding to the devtools commands install_github(), etc. The next key is the first argument of the corresponding function: repo for github and bitbucket, url for url and git_url for git.

If packages are listed in remake_packages.yml, then remake will install all non-installed CRAN packages not listed here, then install these extra packages from their special locations. This assumes the extra packagesdon't have complicated dependencies (in particular one github package does not depend on a bitbucket package). Packages are installed sequentially, but yaml ordering is not dependable so this is not very controllable. It's not wonderful, but it should cover the most common use case.

The future

The reason why remake_packages.yml is in its own package is that remake should be able to generate these, from devtools metadata. This information is basically in packrat already, but not exposed.

richfitz/remake documentation built on May 27, 2019, 8:27 a.m.