In zkamvar/diaper: A Lightweight Way To Catalogue Project Dependencies

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  fig.path = "README-"
)

diaper

This is a package to create a DESCRIPTION file for your project that lists specific dependencies and versions of packages needed for analysis. Yes, packages like packrat exist, but I've found it to be a bit cumbersome. With a DESCRIPTION file, it's possible to list the packages you need for an analysis and install them with devtools.

Update: Of course, the feature-rich package desc already exists for this purpose AND it can be installed without needing the user to install devtools. That being said, it assumes you have an R package and panicks if you don't.

Installation

To install diaper, you should use the devtools package:

if (!requireNamespace("devtools")) install.packages("devtools", repos = "https://cran.rstudio.com")
devtools::install_github("zkamvar/diaper")

Making Your DESCRIPTION file

Here's an example of creating a DESCRIPTION file using the RClone and dplyr packages.

First, you use add() to add dependiencies to your DESCRIPTION file. If the file doesn't exist, it will simply be created.

tmp <- tempdir() # when using this for your own project, simply keep this as
                 # your current directory
diaper::add(c("RClone (>= 1.0.2)", "dplyr (>= 0.5.0)"), 
            field = "Imports", 
            file = file.path(tmp, "DESCRIPTION"), 
            name = "RCanalysis")

By default, it will show us what WILL be created. To create/overwrite our new DESCRIPTION file, use write = TRUE.

diaper::add(c("RClone (>= 1.0.2)", "dplyr (>= 0.5.0)"), 
            field = "Imports", 
            file = file.path(tmp, "DESCRIPTION"), 
            name = "RCanalysis",
            write = TRUE)
# View the file that we just created
write.dcf(read.dcf(file.path(tmp, "DESCRIPTION")))

Now with devtools, we can install the package!

devtools::install(tmp)

We can also update fields such as the default version of R. Note that we don't need the name parameter here, because the file already exists.

diaper::add("R (>= 3.2.0)",
            field = "Depends",
            file = file.path(tmp, "DESCRIPTION"),
            write = TRUE)
write.dcf(read.dcf(file.path(tmp, "DESCRIPTION")))