r-lib/devtools

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

2517 stars · 760 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

devtools is an R package that streamlines R package development with functions for loading, documenting, testing, building, and installing packages. It wraps common development workflows (like load_all(), document(), test(), and install()) so developers can iterate quickly without leaving the R console.

Use cases

• develop and iterate on an R package without reinstalling it repeatedly
• run testthat tests and check test coverage for an R package
• generate roxygen2 documentation and update NAMESPACE for a package
• build and install a local R package from source
• install R packages from GitHub, GitLab, or a specific CRAN version
• create a new R package skeleton and manage its development workflow

When to choose

• you are actively developing an R package and want fast load/test/document cycles
• you want a single entry point to the r-lib package development toolchain (pkgload, roxygen2, testthat, covr)
• you follow the R Packages book workflow and want tooling that matches it

When to avoid

• you only need to install packages from remote sources - use pak instead, since devtools install_* functions are deprecated
• you are not working on R packages and just use R for data analysis
• you need a CI-only solution - the underlying tools (rcmdcheck, covr) may be more appropriate

Facets

library · maturity stable

developer-tools testing build-tool package-manager documentation developer-tools programming-languages version-control cross-platform cli r-package-development r-language load-all testthat usethis roxygen2 cran r

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="r-lib/devtools")