Making vdist

Author

Derek Sollberger

Published

December 1, 2025

Goal

Here, I hope to document the process(es) to make the vdist R package. This package will make ggplot2 wrappers to ease instruction of elementary probability distributions.

We are motivated by the December 2025 LinkedIn posts by Dr Athanasia Monika Mowinckel. She is guiding us readers in R package development over the course of a 25-day journey

Day 1: usethis

For Day 1, Dr Monwinckel advises us to enjoy the ease of using the usethis package. For my vdist package, I am placing the files (within a Windows operating system) into the Documents\R folder.

# create space for new package
# (opens new instance of RStudio)
usethis::create_package("vdist")

# set usage license
usethis::use_mit_license()

# create README as R markdown document
# (opens new .rmd file)
usethis::use_readme_rmd()

# setup GitHub infrastructure with "standard" workflow
usethis::use_github_action("check-standard")

# setup testthat infrastructure ("3" will be explained later?)
usethis::use_testthat(3)

# setup package-down infrastructure 
# (opens new .yml file)
usethis::use_pkgdown()

Furthermore, we were advised to edit our RProfile page with

usethis::edit_r_profile()

and then adding to the RProfile file

options(usethis.full_name = "Derek Sollberger")
options(usethis.protocol = "ssh")
sessionInfo()
R version 4.5.1 (2025-06-13 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19045)

Matrix products: default
  LAPACK version 3.12.1

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.utf8 
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.utf8   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.utf8
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.utf8    

time zone: America/New_York
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] htmlwidgets_1.6.4 compiler_4.5.1    fastmap_1.2.0     cli_3.6.5        
 [5] tools_4.5.1       htmltools_0.5.8.1 rstudioapi_0.17.1 yaml_2.3.10      
 [9] rmarkdown_2.29    knitr_1.50        jsonlite_2.0.0    xfun_0.52        
[13] digest_0.6.37     rlang_1.1.6       evaluate_1.0.4