#45: Some r-ci Updates
Welcome to post 45 in the $R^4 series!
We introduced r-ci here in post #32 here nearly four years ago. It has found pretty widespread use and adoption, and we received a few kind words then (in the linked issue) and also more recently (in a follow-up comment) from which we merrily quote:
[…] almost 3 years later on and I have had zero problems with this CI setup. For people who want reliable R software, resources like these are invaluable.
And while we followed up with post #41 about r2u for simple continuous integration, we may not have posted when we based r-ci on r2u (for the obvious Linux usage case). So let’s make time now for a (comparitively smaller) update, and an update usage examples.
We made two changes in the last few days. One is a (obvious in
hindsight) simplification. Given that the bootstrap step
was always executed, and needed no parameters, we pulled it into a new
aggregated setup simply called r-ci that includes it so
that it can be omitted as a step in the yaml file. Second, we recently
needed Fortran on macOS too, and realized it was not installed by
default so we just added that too.
With that a real and used example is now as simple as the screenshot to the left (and hence one ‘paragraph’ shorter). The trained eye will no doubt observe that there is nothing specific to a given repo. And that is basically the key feature: we can simply copy this file around and get fast and easy and reliable CI by taking advantage of the underlying robustness of r2u solving all dependency automagically and reliably. The option to enable macOS is also solid and compelling as the GitHub runners are fast (but more ‘expensive’ in how the count against the limit of minutes—so again a tradeoff to make), as is the option to run coverage if one so desires. Some of my repos do too.
Take a look at the r-ci website which has more examples for the other supported CI servics it can used with, and feel free to ask questions as issue in the repo.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
