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Organize & Run Build Scripts Comfortably

Working with reproducible reports or any other similar projects often requires to run the script that “builds” the output file in a specified way. buildr can help you organize, modify and comfortably run those scripts. The package provides a set of functions that interactively guides you through the process and that are available as RStudio Addin, meaning you can set up the keyboard shortcuts, enabling you to choose and run the desired build script with one keystroke anywhere anytime.

Installation

You can install the stable version of buildr (CRAN) from CRAN with:

And the development version (DESCRIPTION version)) from GitHub with:

if (!require(remotes)) {install.packages("remotes")}
remotes::install_github("netique/buildr")

Load the package

First, load the package with:

You can skip the step above and prepend buildr:: to every function call. That could be handy if you use buildr functions only occasionally.

Use {buildr} in three steps

  1. First, call init(), which initializes a special Makefile in project root with automatically discovered build scripts that share a common prefix and separator (“build” and “_“, by default). Makefile is a standard”recipe book” which tells the software how it should be compiled. It’s so general it can serve perfectly for our purposes. See the documentation for GNU Make or read vignette("know_your_buildr") vignette of buildr.

  2. If you have only one build script, you may just proceed by calling build(). However, the strength of buildr lies in the ease with which you can choose the desired script and run it when your project is populated with many of them. To do so, call aim() and choose among the scripts buildr discovered for you. aim() will set one of the Makefile targets to be recognized by RStudio Build pane.

  3. The last step that you’ll need and use most of the time is the actual “building”. Simply call build() to run the first Makefile entry that you have previously set with aim().

That’s it! To learn more about buildr, Makefiles or other relevant stuff, please refer yourself to the vignette("know_your_buildr") vignette, which describes how to use buildr as an Addin, how to define your keyboard shortcut and much more.

Happy building!

License

This program is free software and you can redistribute it and or modify it under the terms of the GNU GPL 3.