I am writing a package that does some work on a server. I have a script that updates a table but my intention was not to run it manually and infrequently. It's not a function that needs to go into the namespace or anything, just a script.
The problem is that when I call roxygen2::roxygenize() it runs this script and takes a while to run which is very annoying while I'm trying to develop the interactive functions. I know that I can add \donotrun{} around the examples in my documentation but that doesn't quite make sense in this context. Is there a way that I can tell roxygen to not bother executing this?
I considered making this a function just so that executing it would just define the function body but that seems a little sideways.
Any suggestions would be great
For new visitors, this is not code within roxygen documentation for a function; for that, it would be best to surround it with \dontrun, as in
#' @examples
#' \dontrun{
#' something_goes_here()
#' }
myfunction <- function(...) {
In this case, though, it's including some files in the package itself.
Files you place within the ./inst/ directory are installed with the packages, but they are not assumed to be R scripts (or anything, for that matter). The authoritative reference for this starts with "Writing R Extensions", Section 1.1.5 Package sub-directories. This will install the file(s) on each computer that installs the package via install.packages(...).
If you want something within the package source but not to be installed with the package itself, I suggest you place a file in the root of the package named .Rbuildignore (ref: same link, now section 1.3.2 Building package tarballs). Files that are matched by these patterns will not be included in the package tarball. Whether you put the actual file within ./inst/ or anywhere else is completely up to you: if it is in the .Rbuildignore file, then it will be excluded from the tarball (and therefore seen/findable by the end users).