Project-as-a-package

Summary

ProjectAsPackage provides a template for generating reproducible analyses as an R package. Why? Using an R package has some advantages:

• You can separate re-usable functions from your analysis, and have help pages for these functions. You can also use help pages as "codebooks" for the datasets.
• You can include data and code in the same package. If the data are somewhat big, you can use Git Large File Storage.
• You can automatically install all needed packages when installing this package, just by adding these packages to the "Depends" section or "Imports" section of the DESCRIPTION file.
• You can have one or more .Rmd files in the "vignettes" directory that reproduce your analysis, and take advantage of rmarkdown caching to speed up running them.
• You can use a local package or GitHub private repo before you are ready to make your code/data public. Then once you publish on GitHub, your analysis will be both easily reproducible and professional-looking.

The data

ProjectAsPackage demonstrates setup for analyzing published data from:

Chou B, Krill LS, Horton BB, Barat CE, Trimble CL: Disparities in human papillomavirus vaccine completion among vaccine initiators. Obstet. Gynecol. 2011, 118:14–20.

How to make your own copy of ProjectAsPackage on GitHub

ProjectAsPackage is set up as a GitHub "template" allowing you to initiate a new repository with it as the starting point for a new analysis. Click on "Use this template" to create a new GitHub repo starting with this code.

Building

Building is most easily done using the "Build" menu in RStudio. Building roxygen documentation requires the roxygen2 package.

pkgdown to make a web page

To easily publish your package and analysis as a web site using pkgdown (publicly on GitHub-pages or locally), you can use commands in the script update.sh. This very short script runs the command pkgdown::build_site(lazy=TRUE).

You can customize the website with the _pkgdown.yml file using instructions from pkgdown.

Automatic hyperlinking to help pages

Note that the line in this _pkgdown.yml providing the site URL is only there to provide correct hyperlinking to help pages, such as ?gardasil. For correct hyperlinking to help pages, the URL needs to be provided here and in the DESCRIPTION URL: line.

To activate GitHub pages, from your GitHub repo you need to click on "Settings" on the top toolbar, scroll down to "GitHub Pages", then change "None - Disable GitHub Pages" to "master branch /docs folder". You should now see the URL for your new web page here. If you can't select this option, it's because you haven't yet pushed a master branch docs folder created by pkgdown to GitHub.

See the result here.

travis-CI for continuous integration

This GitHub site is set up to automatically build, check, and deploy the pkgdown site to GitHub Pages with every commit. See the file [.travis.yml] for a template and setup instructions. You will have to:

1. edit the [.travis.yml] file
2. edit the README.md file if you want to show a Travis badge on your GitHub site,
3. link your GitHub account to Travis-ci.org,
4. activate your GitHub repo on Travis: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/pages/. The Travis site for this repo then appeared at https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/pages/
5. create a GitHub token at https://github.com/settings/tokens (for "scopes" choose "repo" and "admin:repo_hook")
6. enter this token as an environment value with name "GITHUB_TOKEN", "available to all branches", on travis-ci.org at https://travis-ci.org/github/waldronlab/ProjectAsPackage/settings
7. Create an initially empty gh-pages branch, where GitHub Pages will be deployed:

git rm -rf .
git commit --allow-empty -m 'Initial gh-pages commit'
git push origin gh-pages
git checkout master

Licensing

To the extent possible under law, Levi Waldron has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to ProjectAsPackage. This work is published from: United States.

Authors

Chloe Mirzayi, Audrey Renson, Levi Waldron

CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy
Institute for Implementation Science in Public Health