In this workshop learners will be introduced to what an R package is and when they should invest the time to make one. By the end of the workshop, learners should be able to build their own package that can be easily shared and installed by others. Additional important topics such as code testing, documentation and licenses will also be attended to. The workshop outline is shown below below:
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What is an R package and when should I make one?
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Hands-on building practice building an R package
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Ensuring your code works as expected - and introduction to testing
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Package documentation
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Introduction to continuous integration using GitHub Actions
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Sharing and publishing packages on GitHub and CRAN
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Copyright & Licenses (who owns the code?)
- Follow the instructions in the System setup chapter of the R packages (2e) book. This will guide you to install R, RStudio, important packages for creating packages (e.g.,
devtools,usethis,roxygen2,testthat,knitr), as well as configure your personal startup in R. - Follow the Installation instructions in the Happy Git and GitHub for the useR book (you can skip section 8, install a Git client) to install and configure Git, as well as to get a GitHub.com account.
Tiffany Timbers, Daniel Chen, G. Alexi Rodríguez-Arelis, Katie Burak (University of British Columbia)