Rencontres Statistiques Lyonnaises

Developing an R package: a tutorial

par Ghislain DURIF

Europe/Paris
Salle Fokko du Cloux au 1er étage (La doua, bâtiment Braconnier)

Salle Fokko du Cloux au 1er étage (La doua, bâtiment Braconnier)

Description

R packages are a great way to write and structure your R codes, to facilitate the use, re-use and evolution of your codes, for others but also for your future self. Through an R package, you can write and distribute R codes with documentation, examples, automatic tests, etc., and it gives you a framework to follow development and coding good practices. 

In this tutorial, we will first see the key points and recipe to construct a working R package: the structure of the package, the documentation of the code, the workflow for the package creation and validation. The R ecosystem now provides versatile tools, such as the packages devtools, usethis, roxygen2 and lintr, in combination with the Rstudio IDE (Integrated Development Environment), that can help you develop R packages seamlessly. 

In a second part, we will cover (with more or less details) more advanced tools and frameworks to bring your R package to the next level, including quality control and validation of your code based on automatic testing, sharing and publication of your code (through official repositories, git repositories, a dedicated website), more complete documentation of your codes with article or notebook-like document, using other programming languages interfaced with R, etc. 

Support: https://github.com/gdurif/devRpkg