Imports and Suggests differ in their strength of dependency: Imports I recommend putting one package on each line, and keeping them in alphabetical order. For example, the following lines indicate that your package needs both ggvis and dplyr to work: Imports:Ĭonversely, the lines here indicate that while your package can take advantage of ggvis and dplyr, they’re not required to make it work: Suggests:īoth Imports and Suggests take a comma-separated list of package names. R has a rich set of ways of describing potential dependencies. It’s the job of the Description to list the packages necessary for your package to work. This chapter will show you how to use the most important Description fields.ĭependencies: What Does Your Package Need? Should be indented, usually with four spaces. When values span multiple lines, they need to be indented:ĭescription: The description of a package is usually long, Each line consists of a field name and a value, separated by a colon. You can see most of the structure in the simple example shown here. See package?devtools for more details.)ĭESCRIPTION uses a simple file format called the Debian control format (DCF). (If you’re writing a lot of packages, you can set global options via, ,, and sc.

Version: person('First', 'Last', email = c('aut', 'cre'))ĭescription: What the package does (one paragraph) Title: What The Package Does (one line, title case required) The minimal description will vary a bit depending on your settings, but should look something like this: This allows you to start writing the package without having to worry about the metadata until you need to. To get you started, devtools::create('mypackage') automatically adds a bare-bones description file.

In fact, it’s the defining feature of a package (RStudio and devtools consider any directory containing DESCRIPTION to be a package). However, as time goes by and you start sharing your package with others, the metadata file becomes increasingly important because it specifies who can use it (the license) and whom to contact (you!) if there are any problems.Įvery package must have a DESCRIPTION. When you first start writing packages, you’ll just use this metadata to record what packages are needed to run your package. The job of the DESCRIPTION file is to store important metadata about your package.

Create package r