Create a Makefile

Create a Makefile for a data analysis workflow. The Makefile can include rules extracted from existing R files.

Usage

makefile(
  path_files = NULL,
  dir_make = NULL,
  name_make = "Makefile",
  overwrite = FALSE,
  quiet = FALSE
)

Arguments

path_files: A path from dir_make to a directory with R scripts containing calls to cmd_assign(). Optional.
dir_make: The directory where makefile() will create the Makefile. If no value is supplied, then `makefile(); creates the Makefile the current working directory.
name_make: The name of the Makefile. The default is "Makefile".
overwrite: Whether to overwrite an existing Makefile. Default is FALSE.
quiet: Whether to suppress progress messages. Default is FALSE.

Value

makefile() is called for its side effect, which is to create a file. However, makefile() also returns a string with the contents of the Makefile.

Details

To create a Makefile in the files directory, set files to ".".

To obtain the contents of the Makefile without creating a file on disk, creating the file on disk, set name_make to NULL.

Supplying a value for files is optional for makefile(), but compulsory for shell_script(). The output from makefile() includes some general-purpose Makefile commands, while the output from shell_script() is generated entirely from files.

References

Project Management with Make Makefiles in data analysis workflows
GNU make Definitive guide
Command-Line Programs Introduction to Rscript

Examples

library(fs)
library(withr)

with_tempdir({

  ## create 'src'  directory
  dir_create("src")

  ## put R scripts containing calls to
  ## 'cmd_assign' in the 'src' directory
  writeLines(c("cmd_assign(x = 1, .out = 'out/results.rds')",
               "results <- x + 1",
               "saveRDS(results, file = .out)"),
             con = "src/results.R")
  writeLines(c("cmd_assign(x = 1, .out = 'out/more_results.rds')",
               "more_results <- x + 2",
               "saveRDS(more_results, file = .out)"),
             con = "src/more_results.R")

  ## call 'makefile()'
  makefile(path_files = "src",
           dir_make = ".")

  ## Makefile has been created
  dir_tree()

  ## print contents of Makefile
  cat(readLines("Makefile"), sep = "\n")

})
#> ✔ Extracted call to `cmd_assign()` in src/more_results.R.
#> ✔ Extracted call to `cmd_assign()` in src/results.R.
#> .
#> ├── Makefile
#> └── src
#>     ├── more_results.R
#>     └── results.R
#> 
#> .PHONY: all
#> all:
#> 
#> 
#> out/more_results.rds: src/more_results.R
#> 	Rscript $^ $@ --x=1
#> 
#> out/results.rds: src/results.R
#> 	Rscript $^ $@ --x=1
#> 
#> 
#> .PHONY: clean
#> clean:
#> 	rm -rf out
#> 	mkdir out
#> 
#>