pkgbuild
The goal of pkgbuild is to make it easy to build packages with compiled code. It provides tools to configure your R session, and check that everything is working ok. If you are using RStudio, it also helps you trigger automatic install of the build tools.
Installation
You can install pkgbuild from github with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("r-lib/pkgbuild")
Example
# Check that you have the build tools installed
pkgbuild::check_build_tools(debug = TRUE)
# Build a package
pkgbuild::build("/path/to/my/package")
# Run your own code in an environment guaranteed to
# have build tools available
pkgbuild::with_build_tools(my_code)