startup – run R startup files once per hour, day, week, …

This article is originally published at https://www.jottr.org/

New release: startup 0.12.0 is now on CRAN. This version introduces support for processing some of the R startup files with a certain frequency, e.g. once per day, once per week, or once per month. See below for two examples.

startup::startup() is cross platform.

The startup package makes it easy to split up a long, complicated .Rprofile startup file into multiple, smaller files in a .Rprofile.d/ folder. For instance, setting R option repos in a separate file ~/.Rprofile.d/repos.R makes it easy to find and update the option. Analogously, environment variables can be configured by using multiple .Renviron.d/ files. To make use of this, install the startup package, and then call startup::install() once, which will tweak your ~/.Rprofile file and create ~/.Renviron.d/ and ~/.Rprofile.d/ folders, if missing. For an introduction, see Start Me Up.

Example: Show a fortune once per hour

The fortunes package is a collection of quotes and wisdom related to the R language. By adding

if (interactive()) print(fortunes::fortune())

to our ~/.Rprofile file, a random fortune will be displayed each time we start R, e.g.

$ R --quiet

I think, therefore I R.
   -- William B. King (in his R tutorials)
      http://ww2.coastal.edu/kingw/statistics/R-tutorials/ (July 2010)

>

Now, if we’re launching R frequently, it might be too much to see a new fortune each time R is started. With startup (>= 0.12.0), we can limit how often a certain startup file should be processed via when=<frequency> declarations. Currently supported values are when=once, when=hourly, when=daily, when=weekly, when=fortnighly, and when=monthly. See the package vignette for more details.

For instance, we can limit ourselves to one fortune per hour, by creating a file ~/.Rprofile.d/interactive=TRUE/when=hourly/package=fortunes.R containing:

print(fortunes::fortune())

The interactive=TRUE part declares that the file should only be processed in an interactive session, the when=hourly part that it should be processed at most once per hour, and the package=fortunes part that it should be processed only if the fortunes package is installed. It not all of these declarations are fulfilled, then the file will not be processed.

Example: Check the status of your CRAN packages once per day

If you are a developer with one or more packages on CRAN, the foghorn package provides foghorn::summary_cran_results() which is a neat way to get a summary of the CRAN statuses of your packages. I use the following two files to display the summary of my CRAN packages once per day:

File ~/.Rprofile.d/interactive=TRUE/when=daily/package=foghorn.R:

try(local({
  if (nzchar(email <- Sys.getenv("MY_CRAN_EMAIL"))) {
    foghorn::summary_cran_results(email)
  }
}), silent = TRUE)

File ~/.Renviron.d/private/me:

[email protected]

Links

• startup package:
  • CRAN page: https://cran.r-project.org/package=startup (NEWS, vignette)
  • GitHub page: https://github.com/HenrikBengtsson/startup

Related

• Start Me Up on 2016-12-22.
• Startup with Secrets - A Poor Man’s Approach on 2018-03-30.

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