Script for creating a new project in Rstudio

Nothing special about a .Rproj file, just a text file with (or what ever defaults):

Version: 1.0

RestoreWorkspace: Default
SaveWorkspace: Default
AlwaysSaveHistory: Default

EnableCodeIndexing: Yes
UseSpacesForTab: Yes
NumSpacesForTab: 4
Encoding: UTF-8

RnwWeave: knitr
LaTeX: pdfLaTeX

So this function would do what you're after:

myProject <- function(proj, ...) {

    require(ProjectTemplate)
    create.project(proj, ...)

    x <- c("Version: 1.0", "", "RestoreWorkspace: Default", "SaveWorkspace: Default", 
        "AlwaysSaveHistory: Default", "", "EnableCodeIndexing: Yes", 
        "UseSpacesForTab: Yes", "NumSpacesForTab: 4", "Encoding: UTF-8", 
        "", "RnwWeave: knitr", "LaTeX: pdfLaTeX")

    cat(paste(x, collapse="\n"), file=file.path(proj, paste0(basename(proj), ".Rproj")))

    message(paste(basename(proj), "has been created"))
}

myProject("MyNewProject.Rproj")

For the git requirement, open the folder and use:

qdapTools::repo2github()

in the console (of course you'll need to install qdapTools).

With the new package usethis, the simpler answer to your question 1 reads:

library(usethis)
create_project(path = "MyNewProject", open = TRUE, rstudio = TRUE)

This code makes a folder "MyNewProject", creates "MyNewProject.Rproj" file and opens a new RStudio session with working directory "MyNewProject".

In the new session, now in "MyNewProject" folder, you can run the following code to initialize a local git repo

library(usethis)
use_git()

You can even create a remote repo in github, if you have all git configured properly, with

use_github()

Two useful references are:

1. usethis

2. Happy Git and Github for the UseR

Was looking for this very thing, and noticed that RStudio has recently put out something for this.

Thought I'd put out an answer in case it helps anyone else.

https://rstudio.github.io/rstudio-extensions/rstudio_project_templates.html