The goal of the here package is to enable easy file referencing. In
contrast to using setwd(), which is fragile and dependent on the way
you organize your files, here uses the top-level directory of a project
to easily build paths to files.
Install the released version of here from CRAN:
install.packages("here")Or install the development version from GitHub with:
devtools::install_github("r-lib/here")The here package creates paths relative to the top-level directory. The
package displays the top-level of the current project on load or any
time you call here():
library(here)
#> here() starts at /Users/sharla/github/tidy-dev-day-2020/here
here()
#> [1] "/Users/sharla/github/tidy-dev-day-2020/here"You can build a path relative to the top-level directory in order to read or write a file:
here("files", "data", "iris.csv")write.csv(iris, here("files", "data", "iris.csv"))These relative paths work regardless of where the associated source file lives inside your project, like analysis projects with data and reports in different subdirectories.
Illustration by Allison Horst