Articles by Posts on R-hub blog

How to distribute data with your R package

May 28, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

Distributing data with an R package can be crucial for the package or even the only goal of a package: to show what a function can accomplish with a dataset; to show how a package can help tidy a messy data format; to test the package; for teaching purposes; to ... [Read more...]

Non-standard files/directories, Rbuildignore and inst

May 19, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

Paragraphasing Writing R Extensions, an R package is “directory of files which extend R”. These files have to follow a standard structure: you can’t store everything that suits your fancy in a tarball you submit to CRAN. In this post we shall go through what directories and files can ... [Read more...]

Checking your R package on Solaris

May 13, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

TL;DR To check your package on Solaris, call rhub::check() as usual and choose one of our Solaris builders. Bookmark this page, in case you get an email from CRAN about your package failing on Solaris. Oracle Solaris Oracle Solaris is a non-free Unix operating system. CRAN regularly tests ... [Read more...]

Counting and Visualizing CRAN Downloads with packageRank (with Caveats!)

May 10, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

This post was contributed by Peter Li. Thank you, Peter! packageRank is an R package that helps put package download counts into context. It does so via two functions. The first, cranDownloads(), extends cranlogs::cran_downloads() by adding a plot() method and a more user-friendly interface. The second, packageRank(), uses ... [Read more...]

Why and how maintain a NEWS file for your R package?

May 7, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

Your R package is doomed to evolve as you add new features and bug fixes. There is some value in cultivating a NEWS file as a response to package transformation. In this post, we shall go through why keeping track of changes, how to create and maintain a changelog, advocating ... [Read more...]

Workflow automation tools for package developers

April 28, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

As a package developer, there are quite a few things you need to stay on top on. Following bug reports and feature requests of course, but also regularly testing your package, ensuring the docs are up-to-date and typo-free… Some of these things you might do without even pausing to think, ... [Read more...]

Retries in API packages and reinventing the wheel

April 6, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

Web APIs can sometimes fail for no particular reason; therefore packages accessing them often add some robustness to their code by retrying calling the API a few times if there was an error. The two high-level R HTTP clients, httr and crul, offer ready-made sub-routines for such cases, but some ...

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Everything you should know about WinBuilder

March 31, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

If you’ve tried submitting a package on CRAN, you might have heard of WinBuilder, as it is mentioned in CRAN submission checklist. In this post inspired by reading R-package-devel archive, we shall go through important questions around WinBuilder. What is WinBuilder and why use it? As mentioned in its ... [Read more...]

Persistent config and data for R packages

March 11, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

Does your R package work best with some configuration? You probably want it to be easily found by your package. Does your R package download huge datasets that don’t change much on the provider side? Maybe you want to save the corresponding data somewhere persistent so that things will ... [Read more...]

Debugging: Signals and Subprocesses

February 19, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

This is a short story about a non-trivial bug in the processx package, and how I fixed it. It is a good showcase of the some debugging tools. The bug processx is an R package to start and manage external processes. It is used by the callr package to run ... [Read more...]

Code generation in R packages

February 9, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

If you use the same code three times, write a function. If you write three such related functions, set up a package. But if you write three embarrassingly similar functions… write code to generate their code for you? In this post, we’ll deal with source code generation. We’ll ... [Read more...]

Code examples in the R package manuals

January 26, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

After posts exploring READMEs, URLs in DESCRIPTION, today we shall look at another important aspect of documentation: examples in the manual pages of your functions! Why write them, how to write them, and how to control their execution in different contexts (CRAN or not ????). Why write examples in manual pages? ... [Read more...]

Objects that feel mutable in R

January 21, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

In R, most often, to change an object, you need to re-assign its new value to it. But sometimes, things feel different because objects are mutable or it seems they are, be it in base R code or in the code of packages. Why and how to provide a mutable ... [Read more...]

From Shock to Competence: How Not to Panic When You Receive E-mail from CRAN about Failed Checks

January 7, 2020 | Posts on R-hub blog

This post was contributed by Julia Romanowska, Researcher at the University of Bergen, Norway. Thank you, Julia! I’m involved in development of the Haplin R package, which enables fast genetic association analyses (very useful for those involved in genetic epidemiology research). We are a team of scientists that have ... [Read more...]

R-hub usage in a few figures

December 18, 2019 | Posts on R-hub blog

Earlier this year when launching this blog we explained why R package developers should care about R-hub. So, does anyone care? ???? Yes! Let’s summarize R-hub usage. Usage data As specified in our use terms we do not store user data. However we do store some usage data. In the ...

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Internal functions in R packages

December 11, 2019 | Posts on R-hub blog

An R package can be viewed as a set of functions, of which only a part are exposed to the user. In this blog post we shall concentrate of the functions that are not exposed to the user, so called internal functions: what are they, how does one handle them ... [Read more...]

About URLs in DESCRIPTION

December 9, 2019 | Posts on R-hub blog

Among DESCRIPTION usual fields is the free-text URL field where package authors can store various links: to the development website, docs, upstream tool, etc. In this post, we shall explain why storing URLs in DESCRIPTION is important, where else you should add URLs and what kind of URLs are stored ... [Read more...]

The Rt of good package READMEs

December 2, 2019 | Posts on R-hub blog

A recent topic of the Write The Docs’ great newsletter was READMEs. It read “As they’re often the first thing people see about a code project, READMEs are pretty important to get right.”. In this post, we’ll share some insights around the READMEs of R packages: why they’...

[Read more...]

Search and discover CRAN packages with pkgsearch!

November 25, 2019 | Posts on R-hub blog

We have just released version 3.0.1 of the pkgsearch package on CRAN! ???? pkgsearch munges CRAN metadata and lets you access it through several lenses: search packages by keyword, popularity, recent activity, package name and more. Get pkgsearch’s latest version from a safe CRAN mirror near you: install.packages("pkgsearch") This ...

[Read more...]

Mocking is catching

October 28, 2019 | Posts on R-hub blog

When writing unit tests for a package, you might find yourself wondering about how to best test the behaviour of your package when the data it’s supposed to munge has this or that quirk, when the operating system is Windows, when a package enhancing its functionality is not there, ... [Read more...]

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R-bloggers

R news and tutorials contributed by hundreds of R bloggers

Articles by Posts on R-hub blog

How to distribute data with your R package

Non-standard files/directories, Rbuildignore and inst

Checking your R package on Solaris

Counting and Visualizing CRAN Downloads with packageRank (with Caveats!)

Why and how maintain a NEWS file for your R package?

Workflow automation tools for package developers

Retries in API packages and reinventing the wheel

Everything you should know about WinBuilder

Persistent config and data for R packages

Debugging: Signals and Subprocesses

Code generation in R packages

Code examples in the R package manuals

Objects that feel mutable in R

From Shock to Competence: How Not to Panic When You Receive E-mail from CRAN about Failed Checks

R-hub usage in a few figures

Internal functions in R packages

About URLs in DESCRIPTION

The Rt of good package READMEs

Search and discover CRAN packages with pkgsearch!

Mocking is catching

Articles by Posts on R-hub blog

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