Recently I was doing R package development, I used 3 packages. But the problem is that I have to run library() command every time I load the project, which annoyed me a lot. Then I found out that I can set the default packages loaded when R start up.
1. First Let’s check what default packages are:
> (.packages()) (Note that the parenthesis can not be omitted.)
2. Files in three folders are important in this process:
i>. R_HOME, the directory in which R is installed. The etc sub-directory can contain start-up files read early on in the start-up process. Find out where your R_HOME is with the R.home() command.
ii>. HOME, the user’s home directory. Typically this is /home/username on Unix machines or C:\Users\username on Windows (since Windows 7). Ask R where your home directory with, path.expand("~") (note the use of the Unix-like tilde to represent the home directory).
iii>. R’s current working directory. This is reported by getwd().
3. Then we need to locate the .Rprofile file, which is the R project default start up file.
file.path(Sys.getenv("HOME"), ".Rprofile") can help us locate the file directory.
For more information please refer to r-startup.
4. Rewrite this startup file.
> file.edit("~/.Rprofile")
# This opens up a script, within which you can enter in your library commands
library(ggplot2)
library(Rcpp)
library(plyr)
library(reshape2)
Finally you can run library() again to check whether these packages are loaded.
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