Download vignettes (Rmd) from R package on GitHub?

user_11308428 0
Viewed 198

I'm trying to install an R package from a private repository on GitHub. Package objects, such as data and functions, are downloaded as they should, but I'm missing the vignettes, i.e. the .Rmd that is located in the /vignettes folder of the package.

library(devtools)
devtools::install_github("person_name/repo_name", build_vignettes = TRUE, auth_token =  "xxx")

My goal is to be able to download both functions, data and the .Rmd from the package using install_github().

Ideally, the functions and data from the package would be in the RStudio memory (which works fine), while the .Rmd file should be downloaded locally to the directory I'm in when I download the package.

The purpose is to make it easy for a user to re-run the analysis (the .Rmd) with the included data and functions.

Is this possible or have I misunderstood the function?

r-package devtools r github
1 Answers

Vignettes are not stored in the local working directory. They are stored in the package bundle itself. You typically access them using

vignette("topicname", package="packagename")

If you want to get the path to that RMD file (assuming the source file is a markdown file which is not the case for all packages), you can write a little helper

get_vignette_source_path <- function(...) {
   v <- vignette(...)
   file.path(v$Dir, v$File)
}

For example with the dplyr "colwise" help

get_vignette_source_path("colwise", package="dplyr")

You could also have it copy the file to your working directory

file.copy(get_vignette_source_path("colwise", package="dplyr"), ".")

You could include a function in your package to do this if you like. you can also actuyally open an edit window for the source file itself with

edit(vignette("colwise", package="dplyr"))

and then the user could save that value where they like.

user_23720640
Related