CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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henryn
henryn

Reputation: 1237

What is best practice for including an R script within a package?

I'm writing a component of a data pipeline in R (mainly consisting of reading in some small csv files and reshaping before writing to a database) and am going to run the process in a docker container probably via AWS Lambda. I've written each part of the process as a function which I've put in an R package. The main wrapper function takes a few parameters as inputs, which will be passed to this process in json format. I want to have some way of including a script in my package which takes the json, converts it to an R list, and passes the elements of that list to the function that executes the process, and I guess I will execute this script using Rscript in the Dockerfile.

What is best practice for managing a script like this? At the moment my plan is to put the script in the inst folder of the package and call it via source(system.file("myscript.R", package = "mypackage")). But I've also read about the exec and demo subdirectories in inst and wonder if this is better? Is there a more formal way of bundling up an R script as an executable as part of a package that is standard practice? I'd really appreciate it if anyone has done something similar and can share a neat solution.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 774

Answers (1)

Dmitry Zotikov
Dmitry Zotikov

Reputation: 2532

In my opinion, it would be best to wrap the code you need execute in a function (f) and then call it as

Rscript -e 'package_name::f()' --args "$@"

Upvotes: 0

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