Automatically run R code when RStudio project is opened

Question

I wrote an R function that updates the version number of a package in another question. I work a lot with GitHub and RStudio, and it would safe me quite some time (plus be much more precise) if this function was automatically run every time I opened a certain project (or better yet, make a git commit/push, but I assume that is harder to do). But I don't know how to do this or if this is even possible.

I could use .Rprofile to run R codes every time I start R, so I could just update versions whenever I start R (or build in that it only updates the version if the date is not today or something) but that seems overdoing it.

Answer 1

You can make a separate .Rprofile for each project. You have to put it in the main directory of the project (http://www.rstudio.com/ide/docs/using/projects).

Answer 2

Well I would use .Rprofile for that. There is something to be said for being independent of the tool chain around you: knitr works from RStudio as well as without it, dito for Rcpp/RInside etc pp.

You can hook into commit hooks for svn, both explicitly via hooks in the back end, or simply at your by end adding wrapper scripts. I presume you can do likewise with git but I simply know much less about it. So to abstract this away, I would write myself a 'commitThis' or 'pushThis' or ... function that does the number increment, test run, code push and what have you.

Answer 3

If your code needs RStudio to be already running (e.g. because it's relying on some rstudioapi:: function), putting it directly in .Rprofile won't work (.Rprofile is executed before RStudio is available).

Instead, you could set a hook for "rstudio.sessionInit":

setHook(
  hookName = "rstudio.sessionInit",
  action = function(newSession) {
    if (newSession) {
      # your code goes here
    },
  action = "append"
)