Before we begin, analyses in jamovi are written in the R programming language. This tutorial assumes you have some knowledge of R, and ideally some experience in writing R packages.

That out of the way, let’s begin!

Development of modules for jamovi requires the jmvtools package. In this tutorial we will:

  1. install jmvtools
  2. ensure that jmvtools can find jamovi
  3. build and install a jamovi module from GitHub

Install jmvtools

jmvtools is available from the jamovi repo, and can be installed in R with:

install.packages('jmvtools', repos=c('https://repo.jamovi.org', 'https://cran.r-project.org'))

Check jmvtools can find jamovi

Now you have jmvtools installed, we can check whether it can locate your jamovi installation:

jmvtools::check()

jmvtools searches for jamovi in what might be considered ’usual places`, such as:

  • /Applications
  • /usr/lib/jamovi
  • C:\Program Files

If jmvtools can’t find it, you can specify the path in the call to check():

jmvtools::check(home='C:\\Users\\jonathon\\Documents\\jamovi')

(you should substitute in your own path, unless your username is jonathon, and you’ve got jamovi in your documents folder).

If you have to specify this path, you can set this for the remainder of the session with options():

options(jamovi_home='C:\\Users\\jonathon\\Documents\\jamovi')

Install a Module

Now we have jmvtools installed and working, we can use it to build and install a module. If you haven’t already, start up jamovi. Next we’ll download a module from GitHub, build and install it. we’ll use the Base R module – you can download it using the direct link here.

Unzip the source directory and open the project file jmvbaseR.Rproj in RStudio (or just set your working directory to the source’s directory). Now we can call the install() function:

jmvtools::install()   # not to be mistaken for devtools::install()

This will build the module, and install it into jamovi.

If you turn now to your open jamovi window, you’ll see a new ‘Base R’ menu has appeared on the ribbon, with a set of new analyses. The ability to install and update jamovi analyses from R turns out to be pretty nifty, because as we’ll see in the next section, we can make changes to an analysis, run jmvtools::install() again, and immediately see those changes reflected in jamovi. This makes developing and testing jamovi analyses a breeze!

Next: Creating a Module