Skeletor is a tool for bootstrapping new packages with useful defaults and scaffolding. Package skeletons it creates contain a test suite outline and hooks for adding documentation. They also are created with a Makefile to facilitate running tests, checking test coverage, building vignettes, and more. Skeletor also sets up packages to use git/GitHub for version control and Travis-CI to build and test your packages whenever you push to GitHub. Integrations with Codecov.io and Appveyor are also made effortless.
While other R package skeletons exist, I found that I never used
them. The defaults of the base R’s package.skeleton,
copying functions from the current R session, never are what I want, and
what devtools::create makes is too bare. I found that I was
starting every package by copying the last package I made, deleting its
code and tests, and renaming everything. skeletor automates
that.
The pre-CRAN-release version of the package can be pulled from GitHub using the devtools package:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("nealrichardson/skeletor")Skeletor provides two functions: (1) skeletor, which
makes package skeletons, and (2) configure, which sets a
few parameters in your .Rprofile so that you don’t need to provide them
each time. These parameters, which are inserted into the package
skeleton template, are:
After installing, run configure once to set these,
like:
> library(skeletor)
> configure(name="Neal Richardson", email="neal.p.richardson@gmail.com", github="nealrichardson")Thereafter, simply running
$ R -e 'skeletor::skeletor("wittynamehere")'from the shell will create a package called “wittynamehere” in a
same-named subdirectory of your current working directory, and it will
insert your name, email, and GitHub account into the appropriate parts
of the package. Then you can open that directory’s contents in your
favorite IDE or text editor. You also can immediately run tests on your
new package with make test or by running
R CMD check on it. See the new package’s README.md file for
further instructions on how to finish setting it up with GitHub and
other hosted services.
The repository—and the repositories it creates—include a Makefile to facilitate some common tasks.
$ make test. Requires the testthat package. You can
also specify a specific test file or files to run by adding a “file=”
argument, like $ make test file=configure.
test_package will do a regular-expression pattern match
within the file names. See its documentation in the
testthat package.
$ make doc. Requires the roxygen2 package.