[R-pkg-devel] Question regarding finding the source file location without R-packages outside of R-Studio

[Iris Simmons]

I think 'package:renv' does a lot of the stuff you mentioned here. I
think they accomplished your issue by making an .Rprofile file for
each project. The working directory would be set to the root directory
of the project, the R profile runs and sets .libPaths() as
appropriate, then the scripts can run.

If you don't like that idea, then I don't think you can accomplish
what you want in base R. There are packages that can determine the
path of the current script. I made a package called 'this.path' that
does that, and it works with GUIs RGui for Windows, RStudio, VSCode,
Jupyter, Emacs (indev version, soon to be on CRAN), and from a shell
(Rscript). The core functions of the package are stable, not so much
for others. There are plenty of other packages that offer the same:
'here', 'rprojroot', 'whereami', 'funr', 'scriptName', 'envDocument'.
There may be others. I can't confirm their stability but it would seem
they are stable.

On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 2:39 PM Tony Wilkes <tony_a_wilkes using outlook.com> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have a question. I hope it's not a stupid question.
>
> Suppose you'd want to perform version control and project isolation. You'd create a project folder (let's call it "MyProject"), and place all the R packages you need for that project inside a subfolder (let's say "MyProject/MyLibrary"). Now you create and run an R-script in "MyProject".
> install.packages(), library(), etc. all have a lib.loc argument to specify the library path. So one can manually specify the path of your project, and then you'd have your project isolation and version control fully set-up.
>
> But if I want to set-up the library path automatically, to make it portable, I would need to determine the script location. In RStudio I can use the 'rstudioapi' package, which is very stable, and so does not really require version control. But for outside R-Studio, I have not found a very stable package that also works.
> I prefer not using external R packages that requires version control (i.e. a package that changes often-ish): you'd need the package to access the project library, but the project library to access the package.
>
> This brings me to my actual question: is it possible to determine the source file location of an R script outside of R-Studio, without resorting to R packages ? Or else use an R package that is VERY stable (i.e. doesn't change every (half) a year, like tidyverse packages tend to do)? commandArgs() used to contain the script path (apparently), but it doesn't work for me.
>
> By the way: I wish to get the script path in an interactive session.
>
> Thank you in advance.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Tony
>
>
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