These subdirectories can be missing, but which should not be empty. The ‘data’ subdirectory contains data files in R format.Ī package may also contain files ‘INDEX’, ‘configure’, ‘cleanup’, ‘LICENSE’, ‘LICENCE’, ‘COPYING’ and ‘NEWS’ and directories ‘data’, ‘exec’, ‘inst’, ‘po’, ‘src’, and ‘tests’. The ‘man’ subdirectory should contains only documentation files for the objects in the package in R documentation (Rd) format. The package.skeleton() function returns a. The ‘R’ subdirectory contains R code files, only. The mechanism for specifying a namespace for a package is through the ‘NAMESPACE’ file in the top level package directory. This system allows the package writer to specify which variables in the package should be exported to make them available to package users, and which variables should be imported from other packages. R has a namespace management system for code in packages. The ‘Package’, ‘Version’, ‘License’, ‘Description’, ‘Title’, ‘Author’, and ‘Maintainer’ fields are mandatory, all other fields are optional. The ‘DESCRIPTION’ file contains basic information about the package. The base package.skeleton() function creates all the required directories.

The sources of a R package consists of a subdirectory containing some files and directories in a well organized structure.įiles ‘DESCRIPTION’ and ‘NAMESPACE’ and subdirectories ‘R’, ‘man’, and ‘data’ are required for every package.

Creating an r package