R package development
package_development.RmdThe primary resource for package development is the book R Packages. It includes information on everything you need to know to build a package (with functions, tests and vignettes), connect it to GitHub and release it. The following are notes on implementing this process and some additional extensions (eg a pkgdown website and GitHub actions)
Set up GitHub Actions
Setup to run R CMD CHECK on GitHub on 3 OSes with
use_github_action_check_release() More details available here. I
had to make a new GitHub Personal Access Token because the one I had did
not have the workflow scope.
I also changed the event that triggers the check to
on: workflow_dispatch which means it is only run manually
because if I was doing development on the master branch in a private
repo and it uses up the resources quickly. The other option is to use
branches for development and trigger the action on pull requests.
Setting up package website with pkgdown
Use usethis::use_pkgdown_github_pages() to add a GitHub
action to build the website based on documentation and vignettes
whenever there is a push to the master branch which will keep it up to
date. It uses a branch called gh-pages to do this so just don’t mess
with that branch.
CRAN R CMD CHECK NOTES that have caused issues
You will get a NOTE that says “no visible binding for global variable” if you use dplyr because column names are not really objects. Need to add .data$ before each, see
This also happened for me when I had data that I wanted to be
available inside functions and also to the user. You can make it
available to users with use_data(dataset) but you need to
refer to it in the package with package::dataset. I have
now had an issue with this where building the pkgdown website failed
saying “dataset is not exported from namespace package” so not sure what
the best answer is. At the moment I am including the data as both
external and internal which seems to work.