Install/importing an R library from cloned repo

Question

I have an R library cloned from a GitHub repo that I would like to modify. However, I've never built and imported a library in R from anything other than CRAN. How do I go about this?

Answer 1

If you intend to modify the code before building, then install_github() will not work. You should clone the git repo to a directory on your machine, and then run:

install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
build("~/put/the/package/path/here")

If you are using RStudio, you can use the cloned and modified source to create your own package as described here.