Script for creating a new project in Rstudio

Question

I want to write a template that creates new projects in RStudio. What I want to do is:

1. Create a new Rstudio project in a folder called "MyNewProject"
2. Create a new project using ProjectTemplate package in this folder by: create.project('MyNewProject').
3. Make some modifications in this folder.

I believe I can code steps 2 and 3. But I don't know how to create a new project in RStudio by a script. If it is possible, how can I do that?

Answer 1

Nothing special about a .Rproj file, just a text file with (or what ever defaults):

Version: 1.0

RestoreWorkspace: Default
SaveWorkspace: Default
AlwaysSaveHistory: Default

EnableCodeIndexing: Yes
UseSpacesForTab: Yes
NumSpacesForTab: 4
Encoding: UTF-8

RnwWeave: knitr
LaTeX: pdfLaTeX

So this function would do what you're after:

myProject <- function(proj, ...) {

    require(ProjectTemplate)
    create.project(proj, ...)

    x <- c("Version: 1.0", "", "RestoreWorkspace: Default", "SaveWorkspace: Default", 
        "AlwaysSaveHistory: Default", "", "EnableCodeIndexing: Yes", 
        "UseSpacesForTab: Yes", "NumSpacesForTab: 4", "Encoding: UTF-8", 
        "", "RnwWeave: knitr", "LaTeX: pdfLaTeX")

    cat(paste(x, collapse="\n"), file=file.path(proj, paste0(basename(proj), ".Rproj")))

    message(paste(basename(proj), "has been created"))
}

myProject("MyNewProject.Rproj")

For the git requirement, open the folder and use:

qdapTools::repo2github()

in the console (of course you'll need to install qdapTools).

Answer 2

Was looking for this very thing, and noticed that RStudio has recently put out something for this.

Thought I'd put out an answer in case it helps anyone else.

https://rstudio.github.io/rstudio-extensions/rstudio_project_templates.html

Answer 3

With the new package usethis, the simpler answer to your question 1 reads:

library(usethis)
create_project(path = "MyNewProject", open = TRUE, rstudio = TRUE)

This code makes a folder "MyNewProject", creates "MyNewProject.Rproj" file and opens a new RStudio session with working directory "MyNewProject".

In the new session, now in "MyNewProject" folder, you can run the following code to initialize a local git repo

library(usethis)
use_git()

You can even create a remote repo in github, if you have all git configured properly, with

use_github()

Two useful references are:

1. usethis

2. Happy Git and Github for the UseR