Command to generate the frontmatter?

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#149 0 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

@t-kalinowski is already working on this.

Since Aug 12, 2026.

  • #154 by @t-kalinowski — open
  • #155 by @t-kalinowski — open

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
r, rust
Domain
cli, developer-experience

Research direction

Start by reviewing the existing ir run workflow and the frontmatter documentation linked from the issue; no implementation files or tests are named. Define how an ir add-template command should create the shown template, including package and R-version handling, and how ir run should report missing frontmatter; the feature is done when both workflows are specified and tested.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I might be missing something about the usual workflow when using ir (tbh, I have just quickly tried it), but shouldn't there be a command to automatically generate the frontmatter? I don't think uv has this but they have some kind of automation with uv add --script example.py 'requests<3' 'rich'.

I don't want to type the entire frontmatter or to copy it from the docs every time. It would be nice to have ir add-template script.R (probably with a better command name) that would automatically add this:

#!/usr/bin/env -S ir run
#| packages:
#|   - <to fill with packages loaded in the script and their used versions>
#| r-version: ">= <my current R version>"
#| isolated: true

I can then choose to tweak this frontmatter or not. That way, I can take any existing standalone script and instantly add the info used by ir.

I can also imagine ir run giving a message No frontmatter found in <script.R>. Use ir add-template to add one.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
66
Forks
2
Avg merge
3h 22m
Merged PRs (30d)
2

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