New CRAN package for R package development: devtools

Yesterday, Hadley Wickham released his new package “devtools” at the CRAN repository. A great R package which supports the development process of R packages. R Packages are the fundamental unit of reproducible R code. The development of R packages is a complex topic and requires several additional tasks next to R programming. For example, you have to write documentation files and in best case you can add some test scripts. The new “devtools” package supports your package development process with commands for checking the package

check(pkg, document=TRUE),

for preparing the documentation

document(pkg, check=TRUE),

for publishing your package at CRAN

release(pkg),

…

This is the first version of the package. But it works already very well. Test it and keep on sending feedback!

For more details check these pages:

• CRAN: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/devtools/index.html
• Reference manual: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/devtools/devtools.pdf
• Github development version: https://github.com/hadley/devtools
• Wiki: https://github.com/hadley/devtools/wiki

A working R package helps you to distribute your source code and is one of the simplest solutions to get your full analysis code into the cloudnumbers.com computing cloud.