Learn R Programming

orderly

  1. an attendant in a hospital responsible for the non-medical care of patients and the maintenance of order and cleanliness.
  2. a soldier who carries orders or performs minor tasks for an officer.

orderly is a package designed to help make analysis more reproducible. Its principal aim is to automate a series of basic steps in the process of writing analyses, making it easy to:

  • track all inputs into an analysis (packages, code, and data resources)
  • store multiple versions of an analysis where it is repeated
  • track outputs of an analysis
  • create analyses that depend on the outputs of previous analyses

You can watch a short talk that describes the ideas in the package, and why it differs to other approaches to reproducibility and workflows.

Get started

Two vignettes provide an overview of the package, depending on your tastes:

There is also an orderly tutorial from a 3-hour interactive session.

Installation

Install orderly from CRAN with

install.packages("orderly")

To get the current development version, please install from our r-universe:

install.packages(
  "orderly",
  repos = c("https://mrc-ide.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org"))

If you prefer, you can install from GitHub with remotes:

remotes::install_github("mrc-ide/orderly", upgrade = FALSE)

History

This package is a ground-up rewrite of our original orderly version 1 package, which is now ready for use on all projects, including migrating projects created with the original package.

The original orderly package has now been renamed orderly1, and will be preserved and installable for use with historical projects without the need to migrate, though this version of the package is no longer available from CRAN.

A migration path for existing users is described in vignette("migrating").

The web framework OrderlyWeb has been rewritten as packit.

Testing

To run all tests, you need to have outpack_server available on your system path. One way to achieve this is to run

cargo install --git https://github.com/mrc-ide/outpack_server

If you want to force validation of schemas during testing, set the R option orderly.schema_validate to TRUE. This will automatically be set on CI (as detected by the CI environment variable) and will be enabled if jsonvalidate is installed. Set the option orderly.schema_validate as FALSE to disable checking.

Licence

MIT © Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine

Copy Link

Version

Install

install.packages('orderly')

Monthly Downloads

679

Version

2.0.0

License

MIT + file LICENSE

Issues

Pull Requests

Stars

Forks

Maintainer

Rich FitzJohn

Last Published

October 9th, 2025

Functions in orderly (2.0.0)

orderly_metadata

Read outpack metadata
orderly_location_remove

Remove a location
orderly_metadata_extract

Extract metadata from orderly packets
orderly_location_rename

Rename a location
orderly_location_pull

Pull one or more packets from a location
orderly_new

Create a new report
orderly_parameters

Declare orderly parameters
orderly_migrate_source

Migrate orderly source code
orderly_metadata_read

Read outpack metadata json file
orderly_location_push

Push tree to location
orderly_plugin_context

Fetch plugin context
orderly_plugin_add_metadata

Add metadata from plugin
orderly_parse_file

Parse the orderly entrypoint script
orderly_plugin_register

Register an orderly plugin
orderly_resource

Declare orderly resources
orderly_run_info

Information about currently running report
orderly_run

Run a report
orderly_prune_orphans

Prune orphan packet metadata
orderly_query

Construct outpack query
orderly_query_explain

Explain a query
orderly_search_options

Packet search options
orderly_validate_archive

Validate unpacked packets.
orderly_shared_resource

Copy shared resources into a packet directory
orderly_strict_mode

Enable orderly strict mode
orderly_search

Query orderly's database
orderly_dependency

Declare a dependency
orderly_comparison_explain

Print the details of a packet comparison.
orderly_config_set

Set configuration options
orderly_config

Read configuration
orderly_cleanup

Clean up source directory
orderly_artefact

Declare orderly artefacts
orderly_compare_packets

Compare the metadata and contents of two packets.
orderly-deprecated

Deprecated functions in orderly. These functions still work (for now) but will be removed shortly. Please update your code.
orderly_copy_files

Copy files from a packet
orderly_description

Describe the current packet
orderly_gitignore_update

Update a gitignore file
orderly_init

Initialise an orderly repository
orderly_location_fetch_metadata

Fetch metadata from a location
orderly_list_src

List source reports
orderly_hash_file

Compute a hash
orderly_location_list

List known pack locations
orderly_example

Copy a simple orderly example
orderly_example_show

Show an example file
orderly_location_add

Add a new location
orderly_interactive_set_search_options

Set search options for interactive use