develcoder

develcoder is an R package containing code and templates to develop R packages. It is based on the book R packages by Wickham and Bryan and heavily uses the R packages devtools, usethis, and tinytest.

Structure

Folder ‘vignettes’ contains the following vignettes:

• package setup, containing code that is needed only once to set up a package from scratch:
  vignette("pkg_setup", package = "develcoder")
• package development, containing code that is useful during package development, including when preparing to release a new package version:
  vignette("pkg_devel", package = "develcoder")
• R Markdown and knitr, containing information about using R Markdown and knitr:
  vignette("rmarkdown_knitr", package = "develcoder")

Folder ‘inst/templates’ contains the following templates (in the installed package these are in folder ‘develcoder/templates’):

• README_template.Rmd for a README.Rmd file.
• check-no-suggests.yaml for a GitHub Actions workflow checking if the package code can be run if the suggested packages are not installed
• check-standard.yaml for a GitHub Actions workflow
• pkgdown.yaml for a GitHub Actions workflow to update the package website

To use these files, put the README.Rmd file in the top-level package folder. The ‘yaml’ files should be put in folder <pkg>\.github\workflows (see section Automate checks from the vignette Package setup and section Use GitHub Actions from the vignette Package development for details).

Installation

Visit the develcoder website to explore the package, or install develcoder from GitHub using the following R code:

if(!requireNamespace("remotes")) {
   install.packages(pkgs = "remotes")
}
remotes::install_github(repo = "JesseAlderliesten/develcoder",
                        upgrade = FALSE, build_vignettes = TRUE, lib = NULL)

For more information about installing and configuring R, see my package checkrpkgs.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.

Citation

To cite package 'develcoder' in publications use:

  Alderliesten J (2026). _develcoder: Code and Templates to Develop R
  Packages_. R package version 0.16.0,
  <https://github.com/JesseAlderliesten/develcoder>.

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Manual{,
    title = {develcoder: Code and Templates to Develop R Packages},
    author = {Jesse Alderliesten},
    year = {2026},
    note = {R package version 0.16.0},
    url = {https://github.com/JesseAlderliesten/develcoder},
  }

Contact

Please open a GitHub issue if you have suggestions to improve develcoder.

Similar resources

• The book R packages by Wickham and Bryan
• The chapter Building R Packages of Mastering Software Development in R by Peng, Kross, and Anderson.
• Slides from the workshop Building tidy tools by Rand and Lyttle
• Package packagepal provides check lists on setting up a package and preparing for CRAN release: packagepal::checklist(type = "package") and packagepal::checklist(type = "CRAN")
• The section Documentation and help from vignette package development contains further references.