Using roxygen2 outside RStudio project

Question

I am trying to generate roxygen2 comments inside my R code and I am currently NOT using an R Project but rather using ProjectTemplate (http://projecttemplate.net/).

My problem is roxygen2 only seems to work within a Project (hopefully I am wrong about this) and therefore when I run the command

roxygenize('.')

I just get errors about a missing DESCRIPTION file. If I create a DESCRIPTION file and run roxygenize('.') again, the code executes and a /man and /inst folder is created but is blank.

Can someone please tell me if it is even possible to use roxygen2 outside of an R Project?

Answer 1

roxygen2 is for making help files for an R package. I'm not sure how help files outside of a package context would be organised. Would you still want R and man directories? If so, then you are almost there with creating a package.

So, no, you can't use roxygen2 in a not-a-package.