rfile

Overview

rfile generates an Rfile to make your R package set reproducable, similar to how Gemfile and Brewfile work. This file is text, with prefixes indicating the source, followed by the package name. This allows for easy versioning, and portability.

cran askpass
cran assertthat
cran backports
cran base
...
cran xml2
cran xopen
cran yaml
cran zoo
github bbc/bbplot

Installing rfile

pip install rfile

Backstory

I'm not in the trenches every day with R, sometimes taking breaks of months at a time from the language. When I arrive back, I'm often looking at previous code, and trying to get back up to speed as quickly as possible. If I've updated all of my package via brew in the interim, I'm going to have a bad time with missing R packages. Having an Rfile that knows about all the packages that I previously had installed in R enables a quick recovery, and gets me back to stumbling my way through the tidyverse again!

Current Functionality

Currently, only reading and writing from the current directory is supported. The default mirror for CRAN is http://cran.us.r-project.org, which can be changed by specifying -m/--mirror.

Usage

rfile -h
usage: rfile [-h] [-m MIRROR]

Generate an Rfile for your packages

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -m MIRROR, --mirror MIRROR
                        Enter a mirror to use for CRAN (default:
                        http://cran.us.r-project.org)

Generate an Rfile

rfile will create an Rfile with a list of installed packages in the currnet working directory. This will cover both CRAN and Github packages. You can then include this file in something similar to a "dotfiles" repository for easy portability.

Install packages from an Rfile

Run rfile in the same directory as the Rfile. That's it.