Does your R package work best with some configuration? You probably want it to be easily found by your package. Does your R package download huge datasets that don’t change much on the provider side? Maybe you want to save the corresponding data somewhere persistent so that things will go faster during the next R session. Preface: standard locations on the user’s machine Throughout this post we’ll often refer to standard locations on the user’s machine.

.Renviron Once you start working with APIs, you will find yourself working with keys and tokens and shared secrets. To the extent possible, you should avoid putting those sorts of things directly in your code. The reason is quite simple: depending on the platform and its API, those alphanumeric identifiers may very well unlock access to your data for anyone who comes into possession of them. Or, if not unlocking access to your data, they can enable others to use cloud-based resources (like the Google Cloud platform) that can cost you money!