Init script for new RStudio installation, promoting best practices

rstudio-init-script.R

# make certain jsonlite is available
if(!require(jsonlite, quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("jsonlite")
  library(jsonlite)
}

# get the path to settings file
path <- if (Sys.info()[["sysname"]] == "Windows") {
  paste0(Sys.getenv('APPDATA'), "\\RStudio\\rstudio-prefs.json")
} else {
  "~/.config/rstudio/rstudio-prefs.json"
}

# is there a settings file present?
if(file.exists(path)) {
    settings <- jsonlite::read_json(path) # if yes, read it in
  } else {
    settings <- list() # if not, initiate an empty list
  }

# amend as required
settings["load_workspace"] <- FALSE
settings["save_workspace"] <- "never"
settings["default_encoding"] <- "UTF-8"
settings["always_save_history"] <- FALSE
settings["real_time_spellchecking"] <- FALSE

# save the settings & get done with it...
jsonlite::write_json(settings, path, auto_unbox = TRUE, pretty = TRUE)