Custom templates

Although ProjectTemplate favours convention over configuration, it is possible to create custom templates that deviate from the standard templates. It should probably not be the first thing you experiment with, but the process is pretty easy.

Configure custom template directory

First of all you need a location to store your custom template(s). To make it easier to refer to this location, ProjectTemplate supports an option to look for, and store, templates. To set this option use the following code:

> options(ProjectTemplate.templatedir = "/path/to/your/templates")

It is useful to store this in a .Rprofile file that is loaded automatically when an R session starts.

Create a custom template

To create a template you can use the create.template function which takes two arguments:

• target: Either the name or the full path to a new directory in which the template will be stored. The name of this directory will be the name of the template.
• source: A template on which the new template will be based. It defaults to the minimal template supplied with ProjectTemplate.

When only the template name is specified the new template will be created in the template directory. If the template directory is not configured the template will be created in the current directory.

Create a project from a custom template

When calling create.project it is possible to specify the template argument. The name specified is first lookup in the template directory, then in the default installed templates, and finally in the current directory.

Update a custom template

As a template essentially is just like any project directory the normal migrate.project function could be used to update the template with the latest changes from the package. However, as a convenience, a function migrate.template was created that does this for you by simply calling it with the template name. For example to upgrade a template called default, you would call migrate.template('default').