Changing default ggsave background color

Question

I am having an issue where a few months ago, the behavior of ggsave() seemed to change, defaulting to a transparent background instead of a white background. For instance this code:

box_plot <-ggplot(vaccine_data_summary, aes(y = vaccine_uptake, x = region)) +
          geom_boxplot(outlier.shape = NA)

ggsave("box_plot.png", plot = box_plot,  width = 1200, height = 675, units = "px", scale  = 2) 

Results in a transparent background. To fix this I have been adding the argument for background.

ggsave("box_plot.png", plot = box_plot,  width = 1200, height = 675, units = "px", bg = "white", scale  = 2) 

However, I would prefer to set the default to white again so I wouldn't have to update all of my old code.

Answer 1

You can override the ggsave function.

ggsave <- function(..., bg = 'white') ggplot2::ggsave(..., bg = bg)

Now when you call ggsave function it would use this function with default bg value as 'white'.