Subdirectory ‘po’ is used for files related to localization. Subdirectory ‘tests’ is for additional package-specific test code, similar to the specific tests that come with the R distribution. This mechanism is currently used only by a very few packages, and still experimental. Subdirectory ‘exec’ could contain additional executables the package needs, typically scripts for interpreters such as the shell, Perl, or Tcl. Subdirectories of ‘inst’ should not interfere with those used by R. The contents of the ‘inst’ subdirectory will be copied recursively to the installation directory. The ‘demo’ subdirectory is for R scripts (for running via demo()) that demonstrate some of the functionality of the package. The sources and headers for the compiled code are in ‘src’. 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.

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