Chapter 8 Package Vignettes

A vignette is a long-form guide to your package. It provides a detailed guide to the package and its functions. Many existing R packages have vignettes. To see the vignette for a specific package, execute: browseVignettes("packagename"):

browseVignettes("dplyr")

There can be multiple vignettes, but it could be just one for the whole package. To add vignette to the package, call use_vignette() function with a package name:

usethis::use_vignette("myutils")

This will modify the DESCRIPTION file adding knitr package as a suggested dependency and it also created a vignettes/ directory.

To add documentation into myutils.Rmd file we will use RMarkdown:

# Introduction

This is a package with the functions I use most often in my projects.

# Running summaries

To run a summary for a numeric vector, execute:
```{r}
numeric_summary( rnorm (7) )
```

If you want to see a summary of a character vector:
```{r}
char_summary( month.name )
```

Once the documentation is written, we can build the vignettes():

devtools::build_vignettes()

This creates a subdirectory doc/ that contains the vignette. Click on the html file inside this directory to open it in a browser.