readme.md

In tlevine/nprm: Node-packaged R modules

node-packaged R modules

npm is the best package manager, so let's use it for R packages.

Installing

You'll need npm in order to install packages. npm comes with node, so just Install node.

You'll need nprm in order to create and load packages. Install nprm like you would any other R package.

library(devtools)
install_github('nprm', 'tlevine')

Crash course

Here are three common things you might want to do.

1. Include one file in another (like source but better).
2. Install a package from npm.
3. Write a package and publish it to npm.

Include one file in another

Let's define tau in one file.

# sub.r

library(nprm)
exports <- pi * 2

And then let's load it into another.

# super.r

library(nprm)
tau <- nprm.require('./sub.r')
print(tau)

Install a package from npm.

Let's use treasury.io in our R script.

Install it from the shell.

npm install r-treasury.io

library(nprm)
treasury.io <- nprm.require('treasury.io')
treasury.io('SELECT * FROM t3c LIMIT 4')

Write a package and publish it to npm.

To publish something to npm, you just need to do this.

1. Write a package.json file.
2. Make an account on npm.
3. Run npm publish.

Get a basic package.json by running npm init.

npm init

The main thing you'll need to add is the dependencies. In the case of the previous script, your package.json might look like this.

{
  "name": "r-treasury.io",
  "version": "0.0.2",
  "description": "Submit a sql query to treasury.io and return a data.frame",
  "main": "main.r",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "repository": {
    "type": "git",
    "url": "https://github.com/tlevine/r-treasury.io"
  },
  "keywords": [
    "r", "nprm"
  ],
  "author": {
    "name": "Thomas Levine"
  },
  "license": "BSD-2-Clause",
  "bugs": {
    "url": "https://github.com/tlevine/r-treasury.io/issues"
  },
}

(Prefix the package name with r- so people don't think it's a node package.)

Then make an account and run npm publish.

npm publish

Since it's so easy to write packages, you can actually do this for pretty much anything that you write as long as it doesn't contain any secrets.

Other stuff

Now that you're using npm, there are a lot of way-cooler things that you can do, pretty much all from the npm command-line interface.

• 10 Cool Things You Probably Didn’t Realize npm Could Do
• task automation with npm run

What's wrong with R packages?

• They're not outrageously simple to make.
• They encourage the writing of large packages.
• Dependencies aren't very explicit.

Good things about R packages that this doesn't provide

• Help
• Examples

Things that npm has that nprm doesn't provide

• npm init detects required packages. This doesn't.
• npm implements CommonJS modules 1.0. Given that R is not JavaScript, it doesn't necessarily make sense to implement this, but it might make sense to add more of the features (probably version 1.1.1 though).

Things to package with nprm

• Anything that people host on arbitrary websites and load with source
• My own data music and data gastronomification functions, like geom_taco
• Small helper snippets that people copy around to their different projects

tlevine/nprm documentation built on May 31, 2019, 3:51 p.m.