Metacomb is an R package to visualize the code flows in your R projects. It creates a network of data and code files, and visualized what data is procssess by which scripts. The network is interactive and annotated, so you can esily see all the steps that modify your data.
Metacomb is still in a beta state, and is not yet on CRAN. To install Metacomb you can use either:
The devtools package,
devtools::install_github("epsian/metacomb")
or the remotes package:
remotes::install_github("epsian/metacomb")
To use metacomb, first open your RStudio project. In the console enter:
metacomb::comb_create_cache()
This will create a .metacomb/ directory in your working directory, inside of which will be a SQLite database for metacomb. For now it is expected all paths are relative to this location. If you run this command again with the wipe = TRUE argument, it will empty the database.
For any script you want to register with metacomb, run:
metacomb::metacomb("UNIQUE_NAME")
Run this from within the script editor inside the file you want to register. The UNIQUE_NAME can be anything, but it should be something that you can recognize as this file. If your script has unique in/out function, you can specify them with the custom_in and custom_out arguments; so for example metacomb::metacomb("UNIQUE_NAME", custom_in = c("read_flob", "read_cats")). There will be some console output when you run these you can ignore if not errors.
Once you have entered all the scripts you want to include, you can run:
metacomb::comb_network()
This will visualize your project data flow!