In recent months the R world has exploded with many new tools (mostly written in Rust) that try to solve one or another problem that exists in the ecosystem. I am tracking all of these at a dedicated page at r-devs.com. Just a few days ago one of these tools - uvr - was released with support for R installation using the portable, relocatable builds published by rstudio/r-builds. This is a major change that brings the R workflow very close to what is possible in python and delivering on uvr’s promise to “bring uv-style project management to R”.
This prompted some rework on the R project template that aims to replicate as close as possible a python-like workflow for R. I introduced this template few months ago with the notes that it works though it could be better.
Now I think a step towards making it better has been achieved by what uvr introduced. Additionally, another tool - rd2qmd - comes in handy to generate the documentation and pass it on to Quarto for a more streamlined site generation and deployment.
The rd2qmd path has also prompted some ideas to improve box internals about how it handles documentation, and maybe it will be beneficial to propose these changes to the box upstream.
The landscape keeps changing though. Posit just recently released another tool - ir - that according to some is an ‘R version of uv’. Depending on how that develops in the future, I may decide to update the template to use it. And this is just noting potentially the most influential tool that was just released, other tools are out there too.
But the template is ready to be used. Code is here: R project template. Try it out.