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Configuration files for R projects

ronfig aims to enable intuitive configuration of R projects via a single function, load_config(). It’s raison d’être is to handle the situation where you have multiple, somewhat overlapping, parameter configurations that you want to quickly switch between whilst avoiding, potentially error-inducing, copy and paste.

To keep things simple, rather than introducing another language for our configuration file, we restrict ourselves to a subset of base R. Currently we allow the following set of functions/operators:

This use of a reduced subset of R is primarily to ensure that loading a configuration file has no side-effects on a users environment and performs limited computation. Under the hood, load_config() is little more than careful wrapping of base::sys.source() and utils::modifyList() with care taken as to where evaluation takes place.

Example

Configuration file

Configuration files look similar to the following example file that we bundle in the package:

file <- system.file("config.R", package = "ronfig")
cat(readChar(file, file.info(file)$size))

# This is our default configuration which must be a named list
# All other changes are layered on top of this.
default <- list(
    date = as.Date("2025-09-02"),
    N = 1000,
    alpha = 0.3,
    gamma = 0.2,
    beta = 0.7,
    max_delay = 30,
    years = 2006:2025
)

# You may need to debug some results and wish to set one parameter to 0 and only
# look at a reduced number of years, e.g.
debug <- list(
    years = 2024:2025,
    alpha = 0
)

# Or you may wish to consider an extended range of years
forecast <- list(
    years = 2006:2030
)

Loading

We can easily load any of the example configurations in to a list in our local environment:

library(ronfig)
str(load_config(file))

#> List of 7
#>  $ date     : Date[1:1], format: "2025-09-02"
#>  $ N        : num 1000
#>  $ alpha    : num 0.3
#>  $ gamma    : num 0.2
#>  $ beta     : num 0.7
#>  $ max_delay: num 30
#>  $ years    : int [1:20] 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 ...

str(load_config(file, "debug"))

#> List of 7
#>  $ date     : Date[1:1], format: "2025-09-02"
#>  $ N        : num 1000
#>  $ alpha    : num 0
#>  $ gamma    : num 0.2
#>  $ beta     : num 0.7
#>  $ max_delay: num 30
#>  $ years    : int [1:2] 2024 2025

str(load_config(file, "forecast"))

#> List of 7
#>  $ date     : Date[1:1], format: "2025-09-02"
#>  $ N        : num 1000
#>  $ alpha    : num 0.3
#>  $ gamma    : num 0.2
#>  $ beta     : num 0.7
#>  $ max_delay: num 30
#>  $ years    : int [1:25] 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 ...

Related work

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
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