Configuration

There are two types of configuration:

• ProjectTemplate configuration are the settings which alter how load.project() behaves when executed. For example, whether to have logging enabled.
• Project specific configuration are the settings which make sense only to a particular project, but you would like to change them easily in src or munge scripts. For example, you may define plot_footnote = "My Proj" to control a consistent look and feel for plots.

Both types are stored in the config object accessible from the global environment. The function project.config() will display the current configuration, including project specific configuration.

ProjectTemplate configuration

The current ProjectTemplate configuration settings exist in the config/global.dcf file:

• data_loading: This can be set to ‘on’ or ‘off’. If data_loading is on, the system will load data from both the cache and data directories with cache taking precedence in the case of name conflict. By default, data_loading is on.
• data_loading_header: This can be set to ‘on’ or ‘off’. If data_loading_header is on, the system will load text data files, such as CSV, TSV, or XLSX, treating the first row as header.
• data_ignore: A comma separated list of files to be ignored when importing from the data/ directory. Regular expressions can be used but should be delimited (on both sides) by /. The default is to ignore no files. Note that filenames and filepaths should never begin with a /, entire directories under data/ can be ignored by adding a trailing /. See Mastering ProjectTemplate for more details.
• cache_loading: This can be set to ‘on’ or ‘off’. If cache_loading is on, the system will load data from the cache directory before any attempt to load from the data directory. By default, cache_loading is on.
• recursive_loading: This can be set to ‘on’ or ‘off’. If recursive_loading is on, the system will load data from the data directory and all its sub directories recursively. By default, recursive_loading is off.
• munging: This can be set to ‘on’ or ‘off’. If munging is on, the system will execute the files in the munge directory sequentially using the order implied by the sort() function. If munging is off, none of the files in the munge directory will be executed. By default, munging is on.
• logging: This can be set to ‘on’ or ‘off’. If logging is on, a logger object using the log4r package is automatically created when you run load.project(). This logger will write to the logs directory. By default, logging is off.
• logging_level: The value of logging_level is passed to a logger object using the log4r package during logging when when you run load.project(). By default, logging is INFO.
• load_libraries: This can be set to ‘on’ or ‘off’. If load_libraries is on, the system will load all of the R packages listed in the libraries field described below. By default, load_libraries is off.
• libraries: This is a comma separated list of all the R packages that the user wants to automatically load when load.project() is called. These packages must already be installed before calling load.project(). By default, the reshape2, plyr, tidyverse, stringr and lubridate packages are included in this list.
• as_factors: This can be set to ‘on’ or ‘off’. If as_factors is on, the system will convert every character vector into a factor when creating data frames; most importantly, this automatic conversion occurs when reading in data automatically. If ‘off’, character vectors will remain character vectors. By default, as_factors is off.
• tables_type: This is the format for default tables. Values can be ‘tibble’ (default), ‘data_table’, or ‘data_frame’
• attach_internal_libraries: This can be set to ‘on’ or ‘off’. If attach_internal_libraries is on, then every time a new package is loaded into memory during load.project() a warning will be displayed informing that has happened. By default, attach_internal_libraries is off.
• cache_loaded_data: This can be set to ‘on’ or ‘off’. If cache_loaded_data is on, then data loaded from the data directory during load.project() will be automatically cached (so it won’t need to be reloaded next time load.project() is called). By default, cache_loaded_data is on for newly created projects. Existing projects created without this configuration setting will default to off. Similarly, when migrate.project() is called in those cases, the default will be off.
• sticky_variables: This is a comma separated list of any project-specific variables that should remain in the global environment after a clear() command. This can be used to clear the global environment, but keep any large datasets in place so they are not unnecessarily re-generated during load.project(). Note that any this will be over-ridden if the force=TRUE parameter is passed to clear(). By default, sticky_variables is NONE
• underscore_variables: This can be set to TRUE to use underscores (_) in variable names or FALSE to replace underscores (_) with dots (.). The default is TRUE. When migrating old projects, underscore_variables is set to FALSE
• cache_file_format: The default file format for cached data is ‘RData’. This can be set to ‘qs’ in order to benefit from the quick serialization of R objects provided by the qs package.

You can override the values in global.dcf when loading the project by providing the option with the new setting:

> load.project(cache_loading = FALSE) # load the project without loading from the cache
> reload.project(cache_loading = FALSE, # Don't load from cache
                 data_ignore = '*.tsv') # Don't load tsv files

For backward compatibility it is still possible to provide a list of options, both as an unnamed argument or named override.config:

> load.project(list(cache_loading = FALSE)) # load the project without loading from the cache
> reload.project(override.config = list(cache_loading = FALSE, # Don't load from cache
                                        data_ignore = '*.tsv')) # Don't load tsv files

Note that this behavior might be removed in a future version of ProjectTemplate.

Project specific configuration

The project specific configuration is specified in the lib/globals.R file using the add.config function. This will contain whatever is relevant for your project, and will look something like this:

> add.config(
    keep_data = FALSE,                # should temporary data be kept?
    header = "Private & Confidential" # header in reports
  )

Note that commas need to be present after each config item except the last. Comments can also be inserted to document what each config variable does. To use project specific configuaration in any lib, munge or src script, simply use the form config$keep_data. ProjectTemplate will automatically load project specific content in lib/globals.R before any other file in lib, so the filename should not be changed. The add.config() function can also be used anywhere in the project. So if a particular analysis in src wanted to override the value in globals.R, you can simply add the relevant add.config() command to the top of that script.

Another option to override the setting is to pass it to load.project() as with normal options:

> load.project(keep_data = TRUE)

This only works for calls to add.config with the parameter apply.override set to TRUE, for the moment this parameter defaults to FALSE. The globals.R file in the standard full template therefore includes two calls to add.config with an explanation which section could be overridden.

###Additional parameters

• munge_files: passing munge_files to load_project allows you to run a givien list of munge files in the munge directory

  load.project(munge_files=c(“01-preprocess.R”, “03-output.R”))

• logs_sub_dir: logs_sub_dir can be set to maintain multiple log files for every run of the project. this will create a subdirectory under logs directory. the logs will then be written to logs//project.log

  load.project(logs_sub_dir= “08-02-2021”)

• munge_sub_dir: munge_sub_dir can be set to run files from a subdirectory under munge. e.g. munge folder contains directories for multiple experiments, munge/experiment1 , munge/experiment2 , then set munge_sub_dir=”experiment1” to run only those files in munge/experiment1

  load.project(munge_sub_dir = “experiment1”)

Running the command below will run files from munge/experiment1 and write logs to logs/experiment1/project.log

> load.project(munge_sub_dir="experiment1", logs_sub_dir="experiment1")