box VS renv

As for organising code within a project, as mentioned packages really don’t allow this beyond collation order. The best solution in this space is the ‘box’ package which implements a fully-featured module system for R. ‘box’ notably gets used by some folks to implement large-scale Shiny applications; if this is what you’re after, I would recommend the ‘rhino’ framework, which builds upon Siny and ‘box’.

You can write amazing, clean, modular code with the box package.

I would look into box https://github.com/klmr/box if you haven’t heard of it already

Shapeless plug: check out the already mentioned ‘box’, I think it’s strictly superior to ‘import’ (but I’m biased).

By contrast, R code doesn’t need to change the working directory at all! Having to do so hides other flaws in the code. For instance, when trying to load code or data, use the tools provided by R. That is, write packages and use system.file or, when not writing packages, use ‘box’.

‘box’ fixes that.

I think your use-case is best addressed by the ‘targets’ package. But I would also recommend checking out the ‘box’ package for a more general way of structuring R projects in modules which isn’t supported well natively by R (disclaimer: I wrote that package). Writing R code as modules fundamentally side-steps the issue of having to deal with absolute paths. Instead, all code and data are either contained in the module or can be accessed relative to the working directory.

However, using ‘box’, as recommended in another comment, allows you to achieve the same effect with less (and cleaner) code, by declaring your imports locally with the box::use function.

If you're writing you're own code you can use packageName::functionName(), or the box package. Which is definitely useful on larger codebases.

As I alluded to, renv exists, but it requires a lot of development work before it is a comparably robust option for the ecosystem. Basic things like a command-line interface [0], working with non-CRAN repos [1], using an existing DESCRIPTION file [2], etc. There are many use cases where renv does not work in a corporate environment (ie not open-source all public code scenarios). Some of those issues have been open for years.

I do not believe the situation is unsolvable, but there is significant work to be done. Renv provides value today, and I will encourage everyone to use it. However, it has significant blind spots which continue to make R deployments challenging.

[0] https://github.com/rstudio/renv/issues/1055

renv for managing packages in projects.

Oh wow! That is crazy!

I’ve yet to use it personally, but renv [1] seems to try to solve the reproducible builds problem in a way more similar to other modern package managers (e.g. by generating a lockfile).

This approach enables stricter validations against tampering with the package repositories as a hash of the package can be stored in the lockfile, however it is obviously a bit more complex to use than the groundhog approach.

[1]: https://github.com/rstudio/renv