Learn about drake

The main resources to learn drake are

The full manual
The package website
Kirill Müller's drake workshop from March 5, 2018.

Cheat sheet

Thanks to Kirill for preparing a drake cheat sheet for the workshop.

Frequently asked questions

The FAQ page is an index of links to appropriately-labeled issues on GitHub. To contribute, please submit a new issue and ask that it be labeled as a frequently asked question.

Function reference

The reference section lists all the available functions. Here are the most important ones.

drake_plan(): create a workflow data frame (like my_plan).
make(): build your project.
loadd(): load one or more built targets into your R session.
readd(): read and return a built target.
drake_config(): create a master configuration list for other user-side functions.
vis_drake_graph(): show an interactive visual network representation of your workflow.
outdated(): see which targets will be built in the next make().
deps(): check the dependencies of a command or function.
failed(): list the targets that failed to build in the last make().
diagnose(): return the full context of a build, including errors, warnings, and messages.

Tutorials

Thanks to Kirill for constructing two interactive learnr tutorials: one supporting drake itself, and a prerequisite walkthrough of the cooking package.

Examples

There are multiple drake-powered example projects available here, ranging from beginner-friendly stubs to demonstrations of high-performance computing. You can generate the files for a project with drake_example() (e.g. drake_example("gsp")), and you can list the available projects with drake_examples(). You can contribute your own example project with a fork and pull request.

Presentations

Kirill's drake pitch
drake + cooking with Kirill
drake + cooking exercises
Christine Stawitz's R-Ladies Seattle talk on June 25, 2018
Sina Rüeger's Geneva R Users Group presentation on October 4, 2018 (example code). The talk broadly focused on tidy workflows and diversity in the R community.

Real example projects

Here are some real-world applications of drake in the wild.

If you have a project of your own, we would love to add it. Click here to edit the README.Rmd file.

Context and history

For context and history, please refer to the following.

The rOpenSci blog post from February 6, 2018.
Episode 22 of the R-Podcast.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Jarad Niemi, my advisor from graduate school, for first introducing me to the idea of Makefiles for research. He originally set me down the path that led to drake.

Many thanks to Julia Lowndes, Ben Marwick, and Peter Slaughter for reviewing drake for rOpenSci, and to Maëlle Salmon for such active involvement as the editor. Thanks also to the following people for contributing early in development.