GitHub actions for R
GitHub actions are a new workflow automation feature of the popular code repository host GitHub. The product is currently in limited beta. It may offer a better way to adopt continuous integration and delivery best practices in the R community. GitHub actions is a convenient service layer on top of the popular container standard docker, and is itself partly open source, thus limiting vendor lock-in. Most importantly, it is simple to reason about if things go wrong.
The ghactions project offers three avenues to bring GitHub actions to the #rstats community:
- Some actions to run R-specific jobs on GitHub, including arbitrary R code or deploying to shinyapps.io.
These actions are maintained in this repository, but are not technically part of the accompanying ghactions R package. You can use these actions independently from the package; they are freely available on GitHub marketplace. In fact, the whole idea of GitHub actions is that people re-use such small building blocks any way they like. 2. The accompanying ghactions R package furnishes you with some out-of-the-box workflows for different kinds of projects. These functions are styled after the popular usethis package. They don't do much: They just set you up with some configuration files for your project, using sensible defaults. 3. Documenting experiences and evolving best practices for how to make the most of GitHub actions for R.
Installation
To install, run:
remotes::install_github("r-lib/ghactions")ghactions currently relies on a dev version of usethis, which should be automatically installed alongside it.
If you're using devtools::install_github() or otherwise currently have usethis loaded, you may need to restart your the R session before ghactions can find the dev usethis (RStudio > Session > Restart R).
Because you're likely only to ever use it once, you need not take on ghactions as a dependency in your projects.
Quick Start
GitHub actions just requires a special file in a special directory at the root of your repository to work: .github/main.workflow.
To quickly set up such a file for frequently used project kinds, run:
ghactions::use_ghactions(workflow = website())See the documentation for implied defaults and alternatives.
Then push to GitHub and go to the actions tab in your repository. Enjoy.