4.3 Naming your package

See the naming convention used for existing packages: List of packages on CRAN

Laws:

  1. The name can only consist of letters, numbers, and periods, i.e., ..
  2. It must start with a letter.
  3. It cannot end with a period.

(no underscores _ or hyphens -)

Recommendations:

  1. No periods.
  2. Easy to Google.
  3. Avoid confusion with an existing R package (not on CRAN/Bioconductor/GitHub) or well known package from other language (numpy, pandas)
  4. All lower case if possible.
  5. Abbreviations to reduce name length (brms = Bayesian Regression Models using Stan)
  6. Adding in capital R’s for fun.
  7. Not getting sued (facebook Rfacebook, Dropbox RDrop, apple appler)

Here is a fun blog post on naming R packages by Nick Tierney. Also recommend checking out his package greta which is really cool and has useful example of using python (to access tensorflow) from R in a package. He also has a guide on renaming an R package