Use lifecycle to document the status of your exported functions and arguments. It provides a standard way to describe lifecycle stage in the documentation, and tools to encourage users away from deprecated functions.
Stages
The lifecycle stages for functions are summarised in the figure below.
The default development stage is 
. A function is considered stable when the author is sufficiently happy with its interface and behaviour to share it with a large number of users. Stable features come with guarantees. If breaking changes are needed, they will occur gradually, through the deprecation process described below.
The stability of exported functions can be further refined based on the version number of the package they are exported from. In >=1.0.0 packages, the main functionality is considered “done” by the author. Breaking changes and deprecations are unlikely. In sub-1.0.0 packages, some parts of the package (internal backend, external UI, …) still need some work and changes are possible. Stable >=1.0.0 packages are the safest to depend and rely on.
Some packages and functions are published in an 
stage. Experimental features are made available so people can try them out and provide feedback, but the author makes no promises to avoid breaking changes. A deprecation process for breaking changes is not guaranteed (but may still happen if sufficiently many users depend on the feature).
End of life
There are two ways that a function might reach the end of its life: it might be superseded or deprecated.
- A
function has a better alternative available, but the function itself is not going away. While a superseded function will not receive new features, it will be kept working for the foreseeable future so that existing code does not need to change. A superseded feature preserves all the guarantees of a stable feature, and is just as safe to use.
- A
function has a better alternative available and will be removed in the near future. Deprecated functions should also produce a message describing the alternative, and whenever you encounter a deprecation message in your code, you should make fixing it a priority.
Particularly important functions can have two additional stages in the deprecation cycle:
Soft-deprecated comes before deprecated. It’s a gentler form of deprecated designed to prevent new uses of a function and encourage package developers to move to a new for. Soft deprecated allows a package to change its extension interface in a way that downstream dependencies can adapt to before users are forced to change.
Defunct comes after deprecated. A defunct function is still exported, and a defunct argument is still part of the signature, but their usage will generate informative errors.
Sometimes the author of function is no longer certain that a function is the optimal approach, but doesn’t yet know how to do it better. These functions can be marked as 
to give users a heads up that the author has doubts about the function.
Documentation
Experimental, questioning, superseded, and deprecated (including soft-deprecated and defunct functions) should be clearly labelled in the document with a badge:
Call usethis::use_lifecycle() to import the badges in your package. Then use lifecycle::badge() to insert a badge:
#' `r lifecycle::badge("experimental")
#' `r lifecycle::badge("deprecated")
This badge renders as text in non-HTML documentation. To document the status of a whole function, a good place to include the badge is at the top of the @description block. To document an argument, you can put the badge in the argument description.
lifecycle::badge() is only ran by roxygen, so this is a build-time dependency. You don’t need to import lifecycle just to include badges in your documentation.
You should also include a brief description of why the function is in that state.
For superseded and deprecated functions, rewrite the examples showing how to translate from the old to new syntax.
For deprecated functions, add @keywords internal and update _pkgdown.yaml (if you use pkgdown), so that they’re no longer listed in documentation indexes.
Signals
Deprecated functions should clearly signal their deprecation status. There are three levels of verbosity:
Soft deprecation: Call deprecate_soft() to start warning users about the deprecation in the least disruptive way. This function only warns (a) users who try the feature from the global workspace (at most once every 8 hours), and (b) developers who directly use the feature (when running testthat tests). No warning is when the deprecated feature is called indirectly by another package.
Deprecation: Call deprecate_warn() to warn unconditionally about the deprecated feature. The warning is issued only once every 8 hours.
Defunct: Call deprecate_stop() to fail with an error.
The following sections describe the details when deprecating functions and arguments.
Functions
The first two arguments give the version where deprecation occurred and a description of what is deprecated:
deprecate_warn("1.0.0", "mypkg::foo()")
#> Warning: `foo()` is deprecated as of mypkg 1.0.0.
#> This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
#> Call `lifecycle::last_warnings()` to see where this warning was generated.
Where possible, describe the replacement in the third argument:
deprecate_warn("1.0.0", "mypkg::foo()", "new()")
#> Warning: `foo()` is deprecated as of mypkg 1.0.0.
#> Please use `new()` instead.
#> This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
#> Call `lifecycle::last_warnings()` to see where this warning was generated.
We explicitly mention the namespace in these examples, but you can typically omit the namespace because lifecycle will infer it from the calling environment. Specifying the namespace is mostly useful when the replacement is implemented in a different package.
# The new replacement
foobar_adder <- function(foo, bar) {
foo + bar
}
# The old function still exported for compatibility
foobaz_adder <- function(foo, bar) {
deprecate_warn("1.0.0", "foobaz_adder()", "foobar_adder()")
foobar_adder(foo, bar)
}
Arguments
The syntax for deprecating arguments is similar:
deprecate_warn("1.0.0", "mypkg::foo(arg = )")
#> Warning: The `arg` argument of `foo()` is deprecated as of mypkg 1.0.0.
#> This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
#> Call `lifecycle::last_warnings()` to see where this warning was generated.
deprecate_warn("1.0.0", "mypkg::foo(arg = )", "mypkg::foo(new = )")
#> Warning: The `arg` argument of `foo()` is deprecated as of mypkg 1.0.0.
#> Please use the `new` argument instead.
#> This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
#> Call `lifecycle::last_warnings()` to see where this warning was generated.
An argument can be partially deprecated by disallowing certain input types:
deprecate_warn("1.0.0", "mypkg::foo(arg = 'must be a scalar integer')")
#> Warning: The `arg` argument of `foo()` must be a scalar integer as of mypkg 1.0.0.
#> This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
#> Call `lifecycle::last_warnings()` to see where this warning was generated.
lifecycle also provides the deprecated() sentinel to use as default argument. This provides self-documentation for your users and makes it possible for external tools to determine which arguments are deprecated. Test whether the argument was supplied by the caller with lifecycle::is_present():
foobar_adder <- function(foo, bar, baz = deprecated()) {
# Check if user has supplied `baz` instead of `bar`
if (lifecycle::is_present(baz)) {
# Signal the deprecation to the user
deprecate_warn("1.0.0", "foobar_adder(baz = )", "foobar_adder(bar = )")
# Deal with the deprecated argument for compatibility
bar <- baz
}
foo + bar
}
Workflow
Where do these deprecation warnings come from?
Call lifecycle::last_warnings() to see backtraces for all the deprecation warnings that were issued during the last top-level command.
Bumping deprecation stage
Some manual search and replace is needed to bump the status of deprecated features. We recommend starting with defunct features and work your way up:
Search for deprecate_stop() and remove the feature from the package. The feature is now archived.
Search for deprecate_warn() and replace with deprecate_stop().
Search for deprecate_soft() and replace with deprecate_warn().
Call deprecate_soft() from newly deprecated functions.
Don’t forget to update the badges in the documentation topics.
Find out what deprecated features you rely on
Test whether your package depends on deprecated features directly or indirectly by setting the verbosity option in the tests/testthat.R file just before test_check() is called:
library(testthat)
library(mypackage)
options(lifecycle_verbosity = "error")
test_check("mypackage")
This forces all deprecated features to fail. You can also set the relevant options manually to force warnings or errors in your session:
# Force silence
options(lifecycle_verbosity = "quiet")
# Force warnings
options(lifecycle_verbosity = "warning")
# Force errors
options(lifecycle_verbosity = "error")
Forcing warnings can be useful in conjuction with last_warnings(), which prints backtraces for all the deprecation warnings issued during the last top-level command.
Test deprecated features
Test whether a deprecated feature still works by setting lifecycle_verbosity to "quiet":
test_that("`baz` argument of `foobar_adder()` still works", {
withr::local_options(list(lifecycle_verbosity = "quiet"))
foobar_adder(1, baz = 2)
})
You can also set up verbosity for a whole testthat file within setup() and teardown() blocks:
setup(options(lifecycle_verbosity = "quiet"))
teardown(options(lifecycle_verbosity = NULL))
Test that a feature is correctly deprecated with expect_deprecated() or expect_defunct():
test_that("`baz` argument of `foobar_adder()` is deprecated", {
expect_deprecated(foobar_adder(1, baz = 2))
})
test_that("`foo()` is defunct", {
expect_defunct(foo())
})
More control over verbosity can be exercised with the lifecycle_verbosity option. See ?verbosity.