Creating a Package

Estimated time: 54 minutes

Overview

Questions

• How do you create a package in R?

Objectives

• identify how package are organized and store on a user’s machine
• explain the differences between each of the
• describe the iterative steps in the package creation process
• use devtools::create_package() to intialize the package development environment
• convert scripts into a package that can be used by others

Introduction

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This is a lesson created via The Carpentries Workbench. It is written in Pandoc-flavored Markdown for static files and R Markdown for dynamic files that can render code into output. Please refer to the Introduction to The Carpentries Workbench for full documentation.

Packages structure and states alt=‘A diagram depicting the structures and states of a package’

Challenge 1: What is the correct order of these steps?

Organize the steps involved in the creation of a package * __ binary
* __ source
* __ bundle
* __ in-memory
* __ installed

Show me the solution

• __ source
  
• __ bundle
  
• __ binary
  
• __ installed
  
• __ in-memory

Challenge 2: how do you nest solutions within challenge blocks?

Show me the solution

You can add a line with at least three colons and a solution tag.

Figures

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You can also include figures generated from R Markdown:

R

pie(
  c(Sky = 78, "Sunny side of pyramid" = 17, "Shady side of pyramid" = 5), 
  init.angle = 315, 
  col = c("deepskyblue", "yellow", "yellow3"), 
  border = FALSE
)

Sun arise each and every morning

Or you can use standard markdown for static figures with the following syntax:

![optional caption that appears below the figure](figure url){alt='alt text for accessibility purposes'}

You belong in The Carpentries!

Callout

Callout sections can highlight information.

They are sometimes used to emphasise particularly important points but are also used in some lessons to present “asides”: content that is not central to the narrative of the lesson, e.g. by providing the answer to a commonly-asked question.

Math

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One of our episodes contains \(\LaTeX\) equations when describing how to create dynamic reports with {knitr}, so we now use mathjax to describe this:

$\alpha = \dfrac{1}{(1 - \beta)^2}$ becomes: \(\alpha = \dfrac{1}{(1 - \beta)^2}\)

Cool, right?

Key Points

• Use .md files for episodes when you want static content
• Use .Rmd files for episodes when you need to generate output
• Run sandpaper::check_lesson() to identify any issues with your lesson
• Run sandpaper::build_lesson() to preview your lesson locally