In the programming world, laziness can often be a good thing: it is both a human quality that can motivate automation efforts, and a programming concept that avoids wasting resources such as memory. Now, when reading code or documentation, seeing the w... [Read more...]

After eight years, we are retiring the current version of R-hub, in favor of a better, faster, modern system. We call the new system R-hub v2. R-hub v2 runs R package checks on GitHub Actions. R-hub v2 works best if your R package is in a GitHub reposi... [Read more...]

This blog featured a post on mocking, the art of replacing a function with whatever fake we need for testing, years ago. Since then, we’ve entered a new decade, the second edition of Hadley Wickham’s and Jenny Bryan’s R packages book was published, and mocking returned to ... [Read more...]

Does your package need the user to provide secrets, like API tokens, to work? Have you considered telling your package users about the keyring package, or even forcing them to use it? The keyring package maintained by Gábor Csárdi is a package that acc... [Read more...]

We’ve both coincidentally dipped our toes in the wonderful world of pretty messaging with cli. cli::cli_alert_success("marvellous package adopted!") #__ ✔ marvellous package adopted! In this post, we transform the hurdles we encountered in a... [Read more...]

This post has been cross-posted on the Epiverse-TRACE blog. In a previous post, we discussed a package dependency that goes slightly beyond the normal R package ecosystem dependency: R itself. Today, we step even further and discuss dependencies outside of R: system dependencies. This happens when packages rely on external ... [Read more...]

When I first started programming, I clearly remember feeling I had to add comments, that would repeat exactly what the code below was doing, as if it were the script for some sort of voice over. I want you to know like I now do that it’s not the ... [Read more...]

Sometimes, testing gets hard. For instance, you’d like to test for the behavior of your function in the absence of an internet connection, or in an interactive session, without actually cutting off the internet, or from the safety of a definitely... [Read more...]

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Do you indent your code with one tab, two spaces, or eight spaces? Do you feel strongly about the location of the curly brace closing a function definition? Do you have naming preferences? You probably have picked up some habits along the way. In any c... [Read more...]

Are you, like we were, tired of filling your functions with argument checking code that sometimes ends up being longer that the core of the function itself? Are you trying to find what is the most efficient approach to check inputs easily and without f... [Read more...]

One principle of programming that’s often encountered is “DRY”, “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, that encourages e.g. the use of functions over duplicated (read: copy-pasted and slightly amended) code. You could also interpret it as don’t let the machine repeat its calculations if useless. How about for a ... [Read more...]

SQLite is a great, full featured SQL database engine. Most likely it is used more than all other database engines combined. The RSQLite R package embeds SQLite, and lets you query and manipulate SQLite databases from R. It is used in Bioconductor data packages, many deployed Shiny apps, and several ... [Read more...]

If you see the web API you want to wrap uses OAuth2.0 rather than a simple API key for authentication, are you happy or do you get nervous? If you get nervous, this post is for you! We shall demystify OAuth2.0 a bit so that you might know how to ... [Read more...]

Have you ever tried submitting your R package to CRAN and gotten the NOTE Found the following (possibly) invalid URLs:? R devel recently got more URL checks.1 In this post, we shall explain where and how CRAN checks URLs validity, and we shall explain ... [Read more...]

If your package uses testthat for unit testing, as many packages on CRAN, you might have wondered at least once about where to put “things” you wished to use in several tests: a function generating a random string, an example image, etc. In... [Read more...]

An alternative title for this post would be “the very meta one”. ???? In this post we shall present some principles and tips used in preparing posts on this blog, that might be useful for problem solving for R package developers and for bloggi... [Read more...]

Ever wondered where packages in general and their code in particular go when you run something like install.packages()? This post is for you! Where do installed packages live? Packages are installed at the path you give as lib argument to install.packages() (or to any remotes::install_ function, that ... [Read more...]

JS and R, what a clickbait! Come for JS, stay for our posts about Solaris and WinBuilder. ???? No matter how strongly you believe in JavaScript being the language of the future (see below), you might still gain from using it in your R practice, be it back-end or front-end. javascript ... [Read more...]

Yet another post with a focus on package documentation! This time, we’ll cover vignettes a.k.a “long-form package documentation”, both basics around vignette building and infrastructure, and some tips for more maintainer- and user- friendliness. What is a vignette? Where does it live? In this section we shall ... [Read more...]