Installing devtools

Devtools is a package written Hadley Wickham and Winston Chang, who are both part of the team developing RStudio. The package calls itself a collection of package development tools and aims to make package development in R much easier.

You can install it via CRAN with:

install.packages("devtools")

The tools included in devtools can help you during the whole process of package development and with sharing your package after development. It can also help you to install packages that are not on CRAN but on GitHub, for example.

Devtools focus on building the package by using the existing conventions to deliver a standardized way of package development. This also makes it easy to distribute your package. The functions included in the devtools package will be used often during this chapter.