r-ci: Continuous Integration for R at Travis, GitHub, Azure, ...

This is the successor / continuation of the r-travis repository, which is itself a maintained fork of the (now deprecated) original r-travis repository by Craig Citro et al. I was an early contributor to this project, and quite like its design and features -- so I have been keeping it around, maintained and extended it. It is my 'go-to' CI setup for a few dozen repositories affecting a fairly decent number of users.

Documentation

See the r-ci webpage for a brief overview of usage with GitHub Actions, Travis, Azure DevOps and Docker. See this r^4 blog post for a short video and background slides.

Basic Usage

Current Example

The file .github/workflows/ci.yaml (also used in many of my repos) provides a working example. It is frequently a copy or variant of the r-ci.yaml file here. It relies on a corresponding GitHub Action which run boths setup and bootstrap steps and should be all you need. A minimal versions follows:

# Run CI for R using https://eddelbuettel.github.io/r-ci/

name: ci

on:
  push:
  pull_request:

env:
  _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_: "false"

jobs:
  ci:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        include:
          #- {os: macOS-latest}
          - {os: ubuntu-latest}

    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Setup
        uses: eddelbuettel/github-actions/r-ci@master

      - name: Dependencies
        run: ./run.sh install_deps

      - name: Test
        run: ./run.sh run_tests

      #- name: Coverage
      #  if: ${{ matrix.os == 'ubuntu-latest' }}
      #  run: ./run.sh coverage

Other variants can be found at different GitHub repos. They sometimes experiment with different containers, or with swapping install_all (which includes Suggests:) for install_deps.

Older Example

An older and minimal example of use with Travis follows:

language: c
sudo: required
dist: focal

before_install:
  - curl -OLs https://eddelbuettel.github.io/r-ci/run.sh && chmod 0755 run.sh
  - ./run.sh bootstrap

install:
  - ./run.sh install_deps

script:
  - ./run.sh run_tests

This downloads the run.sh script, uses it to bootstrap the test environment, then installs dependencies via install_deps and finally runs tests. For a realistic but real example see e.g. this .travis.yml file of package digest. For another example, see package tidyCpp which shows how to use the run.sh script with Travis CI as well as with GitHub Actions, or package dang (featured in the video mentioned above) Numerous variations are possible: running 'test matrices' across macOS and Linux, using BSPM for binaries (both of those are used by digest, running with several g++ versions (as used by RcppSimdjson, ...).

We also use the same approach of downloading run.sh and invoking it for the different steps in with GitHub Actions (e.g. for tidyCpp). There is also an older Action r-ci-setup for GitHub to download run.sh and set it up. Similarly, Azure Pipelines can be used (as was done by a test repo on Azure). The newer Action r-ci is now preferred as it includes the bootstrap step.

There are also other options of use with PPAs and more---for fullest details see the source of the shell script run.sh.

As of September 2022, we rely on r2u to supply a full set of binaries for CRAN for use on Ubuntu LTS. You can use it via install_deps() or install_all() without having to supply the r-cran-* packages explicitly.

Author

Dirk Eddelbuettel (for this maintained fork)

Craig Citro, Kirill Mueller, Dirk Eddelbuettel, ... (for the original r-travis)