The startup package makes it easy to control your R startup processes and to share part of your startup settings with others (e.g. as a public Git repository) while keeping secret parts to yourself. Instead of having long and windy .Renviron and .Rprofile startup files, you can split them up into short specific files under corresponding .Renviron.d/ and .Rprofile.d/ directories. For example,

# Environment variables
# (one name=value per line)
.Renviron.d/
 +- lang                   # language settings
 +- libs                   # library settings
 +- r_cmd_check            # R CMD check settings
 +- secrets                # secret access keys (don't share!)
 
# Configuration scripts
# (regular R scripts)
.Rprofile.d/ 
 +- interactive=TRUE/      # Used in interactive-mode only:
 |  +- help.start.R        # - launch the help server on fixed port
 |  +- misc.R              # - TAB completions and more
 |  +- package=fortunes.R  # - show a random fortune (iff installed)
 +- package=devtools.R     # devtools-specific options
 +- os=windows.R           # Windows-specific settings
 +- repos.R                # set up the CRAN repository

All you need to for this to work is to have a line:

startup::startup()

in your ~/.Rprofile file (you may use it in any of the other locations that R supports). As an alternative to manually edit this file, just call startup::install() and this line will be appended if missing and if the file is missing that will also be created. Don’t worry, your old file will be backed up with a timestamp.

The startup package is extremely lightweight, has no external dependencies and depends only on the ‘base’ R package. It can be installed from CRAN using install.packages("startup"). Note, startup 0.4.0 was released on CRAN on 2016-12-22 – until macOS and Windows binaries are available you can install it via install.packages("startup", type = "source").

For more information on what’s possible to do with the startup package, see the README file of the package.

Links

• startup package:
  • CRAN page: https://cran.r-project.org/package=startup
  • GitHub page: https://github.com/HenrikBengtsson/startup