rmake-package {rmake}

Makefile generator for R analytical projects

Description

rmake creates and maintains a build process for complex analytic tasks in R. Package allows to easily generate Makefile for the (GNU) 'make' tool, which drives the build process by (in parallel) executing build commands in order to update results accordingly to given dependencies on changed data or updated source files.

Details

Note: The package requires the R_HOME environment variable to be properly set.

Basic Usage

Suppose you have a file dataset.csv. You want to pre-process it and store the results into dataset.rds within the preprocess.R R script. After that, dataset.rds is then an input file for report.Rmd and details.Rmd, which are R-Markdown scripts that generate report.pdf and details.pdf. The whole project can be initialized with rmake as follows:

1. Let us assume that you have rmake package as well as the make tool properly installed.

2. Create a new directory (or an R studio project) and copy your dataset.csv into it.

3. Load rmake package and create skeleton files for it:
   library(rmake)
rmakeSkeleton('.')

Makefile.R and Makefile will be created in current directory ('.').

4. Create your file preprocess.R, report.Rmd and details.Rmd.

5. Edit Makefile.R as follows:
   library(rmake)
job <- list(
rRule('dataset.rds', 'preprocess.R', 'dataset.csv'),
markdownRule('report.pdf', 'report.Rmd', 'dataset.rds'),
markdownRule('details.pdf', 'details.Rmd', 'dataset.rds')
)
makefile(job, "Makefile")
   
   This will create three build rules: processing of preprocess.R and execution of report.Rmd and details.Rmd in order to generate resulting PDF files.

6. Run make or build your project in R Studio (Build/Build all). This will automatically re-generate Makefile and execute preprocess.R and the generation of report.Rmd and details.Rmd accordingly to the changes made to source files.