There are a couple outstanding issues related to build menu options. Specifically the Check Package, Build Source Package, and Build Binary Package commands default to the parent directory of the project directory (/cloud) in order to save output - which as you noted is unreadable.
There are two workarounds for how to handle this,
-
As you noted you can place the projects contents in a subdirectory of the project directory (making
/cloud/project/packagethe package root rather then/cloud/project). The defaults should operate correctly from that point on. -
You can also use the associated commands from the command line. This lets you override the location that output is saved when needed,
devtools::check()
devtools::build(path='/tmp')
devtools::build(binary = TRUE, path='/tmp')