Who am I? (1/2)

• Data manager/statistician for CHAI project at ISGlobal.

• PhD in statistics.

• R user, developper, addict.

• R-Ladies BCN co-organizer.

• Co-editor at rOpenSci onboarding (more on that later!)

Who am I? (2/2): Mowgli’s sister!

What does improving the package mean?

• Coding style (against errors, and for future readers&contributors)

• Tests (such good safeguards!)

• Structure (follow the rules)

• Documentation (think of the users, including you in 3 months!)

• Not mentioned today: features, performance

Functions for improving packages!

Automatic tools?

• Automatic suggestions of improvements

• Not automatic corrections… Animo!

Today’s talk

For each tool,

• Introduction

• Application to fakepackage. https://github.com/maelle/fakepackage

Questions any time chic@s!

R CMD Check, what’s that?

• Necessary before any CRAN submission, useful anyway

• Package structure (bye bye, left-over files), missing documentation, dependencies.

• Runs tests, checks examples and vignettes.

• ERROR/WARNING/NOTE

R CMD Check live

Not time for it but…

• Continuous integration is great!

https://juliasilge.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-travis/

• Check out R-hub https://github.com/r-hub/rhub

What is Jim Hester’s lintr?

Let’s use lintr!

Bonus tip, lintr unit test

• the test

if (requireNamespace("lintr", quietly = TRUE)) {
  context("lints")
  test_that("Package Style", {
    lintr::expect_lint_free()
  })
}

• .lintr at the root if non-default linters

with_defaults(camel_case_linter = NULL, # you prefer camel case 
              snake_case_linter, # so flag snake case
              line_length_linter(120)) # you love long lines

goodpractice presentation

• https://github.com/MangoTheCat/goodpractice

• actually uses some lintr linters.

• tunable but I like the defaults.

• “Advice includes functions and syntax to avoid, package structure, code complexity, code formatting, etc.”

goodpractice and fakepackage

devtools::spell_check()

• Function written by Jeroen Ooms.

• Let’s try it!

• Also good to know, devtools::release() when submitting a package to CRAN.

pkgdown

• A package by Hadley Wickham.

• https://github.com/hadley/pkgdown

• Minimal effort from existing documentation to website!

pkgdown for fakepackage

• pkgdown::build_website() after correcting my name.

• Change settings of the Github repo.

• Add URL in repo and advertise it!

pkgdown on fakepackage: customization

• Create a file at the root of the repo called _pkgdown.yml

• Styles, see https://bootswatch.com/

• Group functions & vignettes. Use pkgdown::template_blabla as starting point.

Example https://github.com/dirkschumacher/ompr/blob/master/_pkgdown.yml

Tools we’ve seen

• R CMD check

• lintr

• devtools::spell_check()

• goodpractice::gp()

• pkgdown::build_site()

Tools we haven’t seen

• Continuous integration, cf this post of Julia Silge’s

• Online code coverage services such as codecov.io

• Any other suggestion?

Further resources

• Hadley Wickham’s book “R Packages”

• Hadley Wickham’s strict package

• rOpenSci’s CRAN Task View about package development https://github.com/ropensci/PackageDevelopment

Small tip before even creating your package

Package name check via available. https://github.com/ropenscilabs/available

available::available("dplyr")
available::available("chicken")

Have your code&docs read by humans

• Peer-review at work or among friends

• The R Journal, Journal of Open Science Software

• rOpenSci onboarding system! Who wants to become a reviewer?

Where to find me

• Github: maelle

• Twitter: ma_salmon

And you can also talk to me now!

Thanks for coming and listening!