Building an R package error with devtools::document

Question

I am building R packages using devtools. I've built a package with some functions that I'd like to include. And I'd like to load the package and its documentation at startup. My package files are located at the location:

'~/global/Rcode/Startup Package'

My .Rprofile file looks like this:

.First <- function(){
    library(devtools)
    location <- '~/global/Rcode/Startup Package'
    document(location)
}

However when I open R, the functions from the package are loaded but the documentation is not.

If I run the same lines of code after startup myself, namely:

library(devtools)
location <- '~/global/Rcode/Startup Package'
document(location)

then everything works and the package correctly documents. This thus seems like a rather weird bug!

(As a partial fix I can run

install(location)

and treat it like a normal r package and everything works fine, however this takes time and as I intend to update the package a lot and do not really want to have to run this every time, especially as the devtools option should work.)

I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of `document` function. It's designed to convert roxygen comments in raw R code to .Rd documentation. — Roman Luštrik, Dec 29 '16 at 23:03
Yeah I realize that, however if you have a function in your package: f. And you implement devtools::document on your package then if you do ?f, then you should get the documentation for f. My point is that this doesn't work if you do it via a startup file which seems bizarre. — Sam Davenport, Dec 30 '16 at 13:21

Spacedman · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-30T19:51:30.473

Make sure utils is loaded before loading devtools otherwise there's no help function for devtools to overwrite.

With .Rprofile:

.First = function(){
library(utils)
library(devtools)
document("./foo")
}

then R startup goes:

[stuff]
Type 'q()' to quit R.

Updating foo documentation
Loading foo

And help is devtools version:

> environment(help)
<environment: namespace:devtools>

Remove that library(utils) and you'll see the help function is the one in utils that won't find your package documentation.

Building an R package error with devtools::document

1 Answers1