You will need to care, however, if you’re filing a bug because reporting it at the correct place will lead to a speedier resolution. Generally, you would not need to worry about these different packages, because devtools installs all of them automatically.

Revdepcheck: Running R CMD check on all reverse dependencies, and figuring out what’s changed since the last CRAN release (i.e. Rcmdcheck: Running R CMD check and reporting the results (i.e. Pkgload: Simulating package loading (i.e. Pkgbuild: Building binary packages (including checking if build tools are available) (i.e. Roxygen2: Function and package documentation (i.e.

Testthat: Writing and running tests (i.e. devtools has undergone a conscious uncoupling to split out functionality into smaller, more tightly focussed packages. Writing R Extensions is the exhaustive, canonical reference for writing R packages, maintained by the R core developers.ĭevtools started off as a lean-and-mean package to facilitate local package development, but over the years it accumulated more and more functionality.

Writing an R package from scratch - Tomas Westlake.

Making your first R package - Fong Chun Chan.

How to develop good R packages - Maëlle Salmon.

Writing an R package from scratch - Hilary Parker.

There are a number of fantastic blog posts on writing your first package, including ROpenSci packages has extensive documentation on best practices for R packages looking to be contributed to rOpenSci, but also very useful general recommendations for package authors. RStudio community - package development is a great place to ask specific questions related to package development.

The Whole Game and Package structure chapters make great places to start.A second edition is under development and is evolving to reflect the current state of devtools.The first edition is available at, but note that it has grown somewhat out of sync with the current version of devtools.R Packages is a book that gives a comprehensive treatment of all common parts of package development and uses devtools throughout. R package development can be intimidating, however there are now a number of valuable resources to help!

Create r package