It is recommended to not edit that by hand, but use convenience functions from the usethis package instead. R script templates, or a PDF documentation), but that shall not be part of your published package. Rproj file is an RStudio-internal file that manages the project – no need to edit that.Rbuildignore can be used to specify files that you need during development (e.g.

The DESCRIPTION contains some meta data it is a plain text file that can be edited manually. Luckily, we don’t need to write code like the one in “hello.Rd” manually – there are cool helper functions in the roxygen2 package that do that for us, as we’ll see later. The R script contains a simple function hello() that prints the famous words “Hello World” to the console. There are two folders: “R” contains the R script (there could be many here it is just “hello.R”) “man” contains the documentation. RStudio creates a simple package with the basic required file structure. (For packages beyond this minimal example, I recommend selecting R Package using devtools, which has some useful settings, and starts empty.) It is recommended to start in a New Directory. Don’t create a project inside another project. Packages are projects in RStudio, so you can get started by clicking the down button in the top right corner, below the “X” to close RStudio, open the menu, and select the first entry New Project.

In RStudio, you can create a simple example package with the basic file structure literally in 2 minutes or less, just with a few clicks.

Also, it feels cool and may increase your confidence as an R developer!.

a specific data structure you need to showcase your code

When you want to organize and share data in a central place – mainly useful if this data doesn’t change often, e.g.

To make use of R’s built-in functionality for documentation (help pages), rather than forcing yourself and others to read scripts and comments to understand your code.

When you want to organize code in a central place.

When you find yourself re-using functions across projects.

Why and When Should You Create Your Own R Package?īefore we dive into the How, let’s take a moment to think about the Why and When.

R build package