Do RStudio projects store any temporary data?

Question

I am using an RStudio project to work with confidential data (i.e. a project associated with a working directory, not-version-control). I want to share my script confidential_script.R and project confidential_project.Rproj with a collaborator without sharing any real data, including temporary files or metadata. I am making sure not to save or share any .RData files. However, RStudio in Windows automatically creates the .Rproj.user hidden folder with what appears to be project metadata.

Can I share the RStudio project file(s) without compromising any confidential information?

If what you need is to share codes, why don't you use version control services? Rstudio has good integration with git/subversion. — amatsuo_net, Apr 08 '19 at 08:58
I am working via a remote connection to a secure server which is itself not connected to the internet, so any internet-based solution is unfortunately off the table... I can only export individual files from this remote server. — InspectorSands, Apr 08 '19 at 09:12

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 08 '19 at 12:37

The best way to manage confidential dependencies is to declare them as R objects at the top of a script, and to eliminate the need to share metadata files such as an R project or RStudio project.

Ideally one would create a test version of the confidential information that contains random / anonymized data, develop a few tests / reports for validation, and include these items with the R script so the other collaborators can ensure it works before using it with live data.

The script, parameters, test data and test cases make the script completely reproducible.

Example: download and combine Pokémon stats files

The following example script downloads statistics for the first seven generations of Pokémon and combines them into a single data frame for subsequent analysis.

# name of zip file assigned to theZipFile object
theZipFile <- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lgreski/pokemonData/master/pokemonData.zip"

download.file(theZipFile,
              "pokemonData.zip",
              method="curl",mode="wb")
unzip("pokemonData.zip")

thePokemonFiles <- list.files("./pokemonData",
                              full.names=TRUE)
thePokemonFiles 

pokemonData <- lapply(thePokemonFiles,function(x) read.csv(x))

# a list of 7 data frames
summary(pokemonData)

pokemonData <- do.call(rbind,pokemonData)

summary(pokemonData)

Do RStudio projects store any temporary data?

1 Answers1