Getting started with tinytrail

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tinytrail is a package that — once initialized — leaves a ‘tiny trail’ of human- and AI-readable log-entries in a yaml that makes it effortless to keep track of small to medium-sized projects. The package is lightweight (hence ‘tiny’) and maintains a YAML trail file recording which scripts produced which output files.

The two core functions

Place two calls in every script and the trail stays current automatically.

Function	Where to use it
`tinytrail()`	Once, near the top of every script
`tinytrail_write()`	Inline around any file path you save to

Call tinytrail() once at the top of each script with a short description of what the script does:

library(tinytrail)

# --- top of 01_clean.R ---
tinytrail(
  description = "Clean and reshape survey data",
  data_source = "Current Population Survey (BLS)"
)

Then wrap the file path argument of any save call with tinytrail_write(). It logs the path and returns it unchanged, so it slots directly into the file = argument of any write function:

write.csv(
  survey,
  file = tinytrail_write("data/clean/survey_clean.csv")
)

It works equally well with here::here():

write.csv(
  survey,
  file = tinytrail_write(here::here("data/clean/survey_clean.csv"))
)

That is all you need to add. The trail file (_tinytrail.yaml) is created in the project root on the first run and updated on every subsequent run:

$version: 0.1.0
$learn_more: https://github.com/tinytrail-r/tinytrail
scripts:
  01_clean.R:
    description: Clean and reshape survey data
    data_source: Current Population Survey (BLS)
    first_run: '2026-01-15 09:12'
    latest_run: '2026-01-20 11:05'
    script_runtime: 0.3 min
    n_outputs: 1
    outputs:
    - data/clean/survey_clean.csv
  02_model.R:
    description: Fit logistic regression
    data_source: Cleaned survey data (01_clean.R)
    first_run: '2026-01-16 14:22'
    latest_run: '2026-01-20 11:08'
    script_runtime: 1.4 min
    n_outputs: 2
    outputs:
    - results/model_fit.rds
    - results/table_coefficients.csv

Adding a data dictionary

tinytrail_dict() is an optional third function. Place it at the end of a read or clean pipeline to capture column names and sample values for each input data frame:

survey <- read.csv("data/raw/survey.csv") |>
  tinytrail_dict()

The entry is stored under the calling script in the trail file:

data_dictionary:
  01_clean.R:
    survey:
      columns:
        id: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
        age: [34, 52, 28, 41, 37]
        response: ['yes', 'no', 'yes', 'yes', 'no']

To omit sample values and record only column names, use sample_values = FALSE:

survey <- read.csv("data/raw/survey.csv") |>
  tinytrail_dict(sample_values = FALSE)

Options

Pin an important script to the top of the trail — useful for a main.R that sources other scripts:

tinytrail(
  description = "Master data preparation",
  data_source = "Admin registry (Statistics Sweden)",
  pin_to_top  = TRUE
)

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.