This workshop by the CAA–SIG Scientific Scripting Languages in Archaeology given at CAA2021, Cyprus offers a low-level introduction to R package development. The workshop was complementary to the session Tools for the Revolution: developing packages for scientific programming in archaeology at the conference.
The slides are available as .pdf in rendered_slides.
In this workshop we focused on the main points in Hadley Wickham's book on package development (Wickham 2020) and created an example application together. Workshop attendees will get to know a structured workflow, which will aid them in organizing their personal scripts afterwards. Main topics include function definition in R, the R package structure and the typical package development cycle. If time allows, we will also introduce topics like vignettes, unit tests or shipping data with packages.
Basic R knowledge is strongly recommended. Beyond that you need the following software on the computer you use to participate in the workshop:
- R
- RStudio Desktop
- For Windows users: Rtools
To test if your R setup is ready for package development, you can try to install a package from Github.
if(!require('remotes')) install.packages('remotes')
remotes::install_github("r-lib/devtools")
Devtools is also the main package we will need for the workshop.