tic

The goal of tic is to enhance and simplify working with continuous integration (CI) systems.

The following ones are supported:

• Travis CI (both https://travis-ci.org and https://travis-ci.com) (Linux, macOS)
• AppVeyor (Windows)
• Circle CI (Linux)

To learn more about CI, read the "Travis CI for test automation" blog post and our Getting Started vignette.

The most important improvements over existing solutions are:

1. Deployment to a Git repository is greatly simplified. Update your repository with results from the CI build.

2. Support for R packages and other kinds of project (bookdown, blogdown, etc.), with predefined templates. Set up your project to deploy rendered versions of your book or blog with a single push to Git.

3. Workflow specification in a single .R file, regardless of CI system used.
   Forget about .yml files or web browser configurations.

Installation

{tic} can be installed from GitHub with:

remotes::install_github("ropensci/tic")

Setup

By calling tic::use_tic() a production ready CI setup is initialized, tailored to your specific R project. The created templates will use the providers https://travis-ci.com, https://appveyor.com and https://circleci.com. For more information about the difference between https://travis-ci.org and https://travis-ci.com see the vignette about Travis CI '.org' vs '.com'.

If only the CI YAML templates from {tic} are desired, the use_<provider>_yml() functions can be used. Refer to the complete list of options.

For an R package, the following steps will be set up for the CI workflow:

• Installation of required dependencies for the project (by checking the mandatory(!) DESCRIPTION file)
• Satisfying build-time dependencies of steps to be run in all CI stages (by scraping pkg::fun calls in tic.R)
• Checking of package via rcmdcheck::rcmdcheck()
• Creation of a pkgdown site including Github deployment
• Running a code coverage and upload to codecov.io

See the Getting Started vignette for more information and links to minimal example repositories for various R projects (package, blogdown, bookdown and more).

Good to know

We would like to mention that {tic} is a choice and sits on top of existing community efforts providing R support for various CI providers. While {tic} will prevent you from dealing/learning every CIs YAML syntax, you will have to learn {tic}'s way of specifying your tasks on CI systems.

Also, there is no way around familiarizing yourself with the basics of CI systems in general. Without this knowledge, you will also have a hard way understanding {tic}.

There is not yet an automated way of updating the templates installed by {tic}, hence you need to manually check every once in a while if we made some changes to the templates.

We also recommend to take a look at the projects providing the direct R support for each CI system (which {tic} builds upon) to gain a deeper understanding of the whole concept.

Examples

All examples listed here work with Travis, some work with AppVeyor too. The badges link to the most recent build of the master branch.

• tic.blogdown: Blogs with blogdown

• tic.bookdown: Books with bookdown

• tic.covrpage: Unit test summary report.

• tic.drat: CRAN-like package repositories with drat

• tic.figshare: Deploying artifacts to figshare (work in progress).

• tic.package: R packages with pkgdown documentation

• tic.packagedocs: R packages with packagedocs documentation

• tic.website: Websites with rmarkdown

Vignettes

• Get started

• Feature Overview

• The CI Build Lifecycle

• CI Client Packages

• Advanced Usage

• Deployment

• Custom Steps

• Travis CI '.org' vs '.com'

Limitations

The setup functions in this package assume Git as version control system, and GitHub as platform. Automated setup works best if the project under test is located in the root of the Git repository. Multi-project repositories are not supported, see the comment by @jwijffels for guidance to work around this limitation.