docstring

1.0.0

Provides Docstring Capabilities to R Functions

1packages depend

18.3Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

13/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Dason KurkiewiczFirst published 2017-03-241 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Provides the ability to display something analogous to Python's docstrings within R. By allowing the user to document their functions as comments at the beginning of their function without requiring putting the function into a package we allow more users to easily provide documentation for their functions. The documentation can be viewed just like any other help files for functions provided by packages as well.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("docstring", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("dasonk/docstring")

Development version from dasonk/docstring. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-docstring

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-docstring

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-docstring

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 1.1 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Code health

None

Tests · ratio 0.00

not tracked

Coverage

100%

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMENoVignettesYes · dynamicpkgdown siteNoNEWSYes · 33% structuredCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 0%
Documented parameters: 80%
Return-value docs: 0%
References docs: 0%

Downloads

18.3K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #3,697 · ~50/day · ~1.5K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

86830 days

2.9K90 days

18.3K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on1.7K r2u18 autocran

Repository

GitHub ↗ dasonk/docstring

59Stars

6Forks

19Open issues

1Open PRs

1Releases

65Commits

3Contributors

rdocumentationdocumentation-tooldocstringroxygen-styledevtoolsr-package

65 commits · Last activity 2021-12-21 · 0% stars, 30d

Stars over time

2025-06-16 · 582026-07-07 · 59

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

1 development-tooling and community-health practice detected across 1 family in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/dasonk/docstring on 2026-07-19.

Continuous integration (1)

Travis CI

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

5 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (0)

none

Imports (3)

roxygen2utilstools

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (4)

devtools rstudioapi knitr rmarkdown

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

1direct

0indirect

aggutils

Code & Tests

Code Composition

R 295 (50%)Vignettes 216 (36%)Rd 82 (14%)

Code characteristics

Cyclomatic complexity: 3.5 median / 8 max

Test coverage

Line coverage

–

Expression

–

Tests / Examples

–

Functions

4 2 exported

Complexity

4 avg / 8 max

Call network

4 nodes / 4 edges

Call graph

Open call graph →

Loading call graph…

Lowest coverage

Per-function coverage is not measured for this package yet.

People & History

People (2)

Maintainer (1)

Dason Kurkiewicz

Author, Maintainer

Authors (1)

Dason Kurkiewicz

Author, Maintainer

Contributors (1)

Neal Fultz

Contributor

Package Timeline

1 release. R releases are shown for context.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.0.0Latest
2026-03-10 · current release
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11

Package metadata

First published: 2017-03-24
Total releases: 1 / 9 yrs
License: GPL-2 OSI
Download size: 14 KB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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