// the find
hadley/r-pkgs
Building R packages
This is the source for the R Packages book (2nd edition, hosted at r-pkgs.org) by Hadley Wickham, built with Quarto. It's for anyone writing an R package who wants the canonical, opinionated walkthrough of package structure, testing, and CRAN submission — not a code library itself, just the book's raw text and build scripts.
Written by the person behind devtools/usethis, so the workflow described matches the tooling you'll actually use, not a generic tutorial disconnected from the ecosystem. The GitHub Actions render workflow keeps the deployed site in sync with the repo automatically. Chapter-per-file structure (testing-basics.Rmd, namespace content, release.Rmd) makes it easy to find or link a specific topic instead of hunting through one giant document.
There's no code to install or import here — it's prose plus diagrams, so 'stars' and 'forks' measure book popularity, not adoption of anything functional. The advice is tied hard to the devtools/usethis/RStudio workflow; if you use base R tooling or a different editor, several chapters won't map cleanly onto your setup. Contributing meaningfully requires understanding the Quarto build and Netlify deploy pipeline, which is more friction than a typical docs PR. The README itself is just build/callout mechanics for contributors, not an introduction to the book's content.