It’s often beneficial to have a variable shared between all the functions in an R package. One obvious example would be the maintenance of a package-wide cache for all of your functions. I’ve encountered this situation multiple times and always forget at least one important step in the process, so I thought I’d document it here for myself and anyone else who might encounter this issue. I setup a simple project on GitHub to demonstrate the various attempts you may take to solve the problem and, ultimately, a solution: https://github.com/trestletech/RCache. The rest of this article will presume some knowledge of authoring R packages. If that’s not you, check out RStudio’s guide to authoring R packages.

If you’ve encountered errors such as

GitHub recently launched a more powerful search feature which has been used on more than one occasion to identify sensitive files that may be hosted in a public GitHub repository. When used innocently, there are all sorts of fun things you can find with this search feature.

Below you can download the slides presented on February 9, 2013 at the Dallas R Users Group on RStudio’s Shiny framework which allows you to create interactive web applications in R. No knowledge of HTML or JavaScript is required!