rudeboybert / travis_rmd_test

Automatically test if R Markdown files "knit" ✅ or not ❌ using travis-ci on GitHub

travis_rmd_test

Automatically test if .Rmd R Markdown files "knit" ✅ or not ❌ using travis-ci on GitHub.

Instructors: If you use this repo's RStudio Project contents as a template for assigning student problem sets and projects (in particular the DESCRIPTION, .travis.yml & _build.sh files), then students will be able to check for themselves on GitHub whether their work is reproducible by looking at the above "travis status badge."

I welcome your comments, questions, and feedback via a GitHub issue! Shout out to Chester Ismay for his help with travis-ci and to Katie Kinnaird for brainstorming with me.

Take it for a test drive!

• Fork and clone a copy of this repo
• Integrate your GitHub account and travis-ci by following steps 1-3 of these instructions
• Trigger the first travis build by pushing a commit.
  • For example, a good first commit would be to edit README.md -> Line 3 -> replace both instances of rudeboybert with your GitHub login. That way the resulting "travis status badge" you see on GitHub.com reflects the pass/fail status of your forked repo (and not rudeboybert's).
  • The first travis build will take a while (approximately 15 minutes) as travis needs to install R and all packages (in particular tidyverse). Because R and package builds get cached however, all subsequent travis builds will be much quicker.
• Check that travis returns ❌ if all .Rmd files don't knit:
  • Edit test_me.Rmd so that it does not knit. Commit and push these changes.
  • You can see real-time updates of the progress of the travis checks at https://travis-ci.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/travis_rmd_test.
  • After travis checks are done, your "travis status badge" should now read "build: failing" in red. Click on "travis status badge" for the report.
• Check that travis returns ✅ if all .Rmd files do knit:
  • Revert the above change to test_me.Rmd. Commit and push these changes.
  • You can see real-time updates of the progress of the travis checks at https://travis-ci.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/travis_rmd_test.
  • After travis checks are done, your "travis status badge" should now read "build: passing" in green. Click on "travis status badge" for the report.

Things to keep in mind

• The user is responsible for adding all packages used in any .Rmd file to .travis.yml as follows:
  • CRAN versions under r_packages
  • GitHub versions under r_github_packages
• here::here() is used to handle macOS, windows, and UNIX variations in file path specifications.
• The _build.sh bash file is set up to test if every .Rmd file in the repo/RStudio Project folder knits or not.

TODO

• Record a loom screencast demonstrating all of this
• Vouch for using usethis package to initiate GitHub from a downloaded .zip file of repo.

# Enable git in an RStudio project
usethis::use_git()
# Restart R, then follow these steps to create a new repo on GitHub and make 
# first commit of contents of RStudio Project
usethis::use_github()