---
title: "Getting Started with Drake in R | Matthew Oldach"
url: "https://matthewoldach.com/writing/drake/"
description: "An introduction to reproducible data workflows with drake in R, with links to the original talk and presentation."
---

1.  [Start](https://matthewoldach.com/)
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3.  Getting Started with Drake in R

Software · R

# Getting Started with Drake in R

[Matthew Oldach](https://matthewoldach.com/about/)2019-02-05

An introduction to reproducible data workflows with drake in R, with links to the original talk and presentation.

Recovered from the [original publication](https://moldach.github.io/post/drake/). Historical tools and examples are preserved in context; this is not a claim that their integrations still run unchanged.

Recently I got interested in using the `xaringan` package for creating HTML based R Markdown documents because I could use the `widgetframe` package to embed `htmlwidgets` as responsive iframes (I had created some spinning 3D visulizations with pseudo-coloring I wanted to present interactively).

`xaringan`, it’s a `R` pacakges for creating slideshows with [`remark.js`](http://remarkjs.com/) through R Markdown.

Around the same time I learnt about [`Drake`](https://github.com/ropensci/drake) (or “Data Frames in R for Make”) which is an amazing a time-saving reproducible build system for data scientist specifically tailored to `R`. The pacakge makes use of the `futures` package allowing the use of parallel computing on high-performance computing systems.

I recently gave a talk at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute talking about the advantages of Drake (and a few other interesting projects).

![Original illustration from drake](https://media.giphy.com/media/3fhu1Pm9kYB5RgDtn7/giphy.gif)

The slides can be found [here](https://moldach.github.io/xaringan-presentation_drake/)

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