Force source rebuild in R package

Question

This is similar to this question and answer , except specialized to R packages. Since R uses its own custom build process, what is the correct way to force a rebuild using Rcpp?

(For reasons that I won't go into here, all of my C++ code is located outside /pkg/src, and is called via a simple wrapper function that never changes. For this reason, when the important code changes, R thinks nothing has changed and declares the dreaded make: Nothing to be done for 'all'. )

Answer 1

Regarding

what is the correct way to force a rebuild using Rcpp

the obvious answer is to rebuild from source

R CMD INSTALL sourceTarballOfPackage_0.1.2.tar.gz

The question then becomes where to get the source: CRAN, GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, ... but we have helpers for that.

If your code is internal, then you just need to rebuild the wrapper calling it, and that is still in src/ in the package. That is no different then another R(cpp) package linking against external resources.

Answer 2

The simplest solution is to add the flag --preclean to R CMD INSTALL . In Rstudio, this flag can be added under Project Options -> Build Tools -> Build and reload - R CMD INSTALL additonal options.