Suppress package startup messages

Sometimes your reprex uses packages that emit messages and warnings at startup (dplyr is a very common culprit). In general, these are worth reading! They can alert you to the root cause of your problem, such as a function in one package masking a function in another. But in many cases, this is just distracting, startup noise.

How can you silence this chatter, specifically? We don’t want to suppress messages and warnings, in general, because they are an important part of the reprex.

TL;DR

Here’s a quick look at various techniques. They are described in more detail below.

Call library() with warn.conflicts = FALSE.

library(dplyr, warn.conflicts = FALSE)

Surround a chatty library() call with suppressPackageStartupMessages().

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(dplyr))

Break your reprex into “chunks”, in the .Rmd sense, and use a special #+ comment to silence messages and/or warnings for the chunk that holds a chatty library() call. Note that the second #+ comment is very important, so you don’t silence messages and warnings for the entire reprex.

#+ message = FALSE, warning = FALSE
library(dplyr)

#+
slice(iris, 1)

If you’re using one or more tidyverse packages, consider using the tidyverse metapackage, literally. reprex::reprex() has an argument tidyverse_quiet, which defaults to TRUE and silences the startup messages.

library(tidyverse)

slice(iris, 1)

tidyverse_quiet also silences startup messages from the tidymodels meta-package.

dplyr is chatty at startup

dplyr is a common culprit for noisy startup, so we use it as an example. Note this messaging as a baseline.

library(dplyr)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'dplyr'
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
#> 
#>     filter, lag
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

warn.conflicts = FALSE

To suppress warnings about conflicts, set the warn.conflicts argument of library() to FALSE.

library(dplyr, warn.conflicts = FALSE)

slice(iris, 1)
#>   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
#> 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa

suppressPackageStartupMessages()

Surround library() with suppressPackageStartupMessages().

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(dplyr))

slice(iris, 1)
#>   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
#> 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa

Set message = FALSE and warning = FALSE for a chunk

If we were working in R Markdown, we could suppress messages and warnings in the chunk containing library() calls, then put our “real code” in a different chunk:

```{r, message = FALSE, warning = FALSE}  
library(dplyr)  
```

Some text.

```{r}     
slice(iris, 1)
```

We can do the same in plain R code, suitable for reprex()ing, by using special comments that start with #+. Note that the second #+ is significant, because it begins a new chunk capable of emitting messages and warnings.

#+ message = FALSE, warning = FALSE
library(dplyr)
message("You CANNOT hear me!")

#+ 
message("You can hear me!")
slice(iris, 1)

reprex knows about tidyverse_quiet

The reprex::reprex() function has a tidyverse_quiet argument that defaults to TRUE. If your reprex uses one or more tidyverse packages, consider attaching the tidyverse metapackage, instead of individual packages, in order to enjoy a quiet startup.

library(tidyverse) # instead of library(dplyr)

slice(iris, 1)

#>   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
#> 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa

Note that this default behaviour can be overridden by setting tidyverse_quiet = FALSE in a specific reprex() call or by setting the option reprex.tidyverse_quiet = FALSE in the .Rprofile startup file. The tidyverse_quiet argument and reprex.tidyverse_quiet option also affect startup messages from the tidymodels meta-package.