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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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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...]

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...]

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...]