In this lab, we will learn how to turn on continuous integration checking.

Goal: by the end of this lab, you should be able to automate checking for your GitHub package.

Continuous integration

Checking your software for errors on a variety of different platforms can help you make it more robust. To make this process automatic, we can use a cloud-based, continuous integration service like Travis-CI.

Travis-CI will run R CMD check on your package on a virtual machine instance running a plain version of Ubuntu. Your Travis-CI account is linked to your GitHub account, and a new check will be triggered automatically every time you push a new commit to your GitHub repository.

To enable Travis-CI checking, use the use_travis() function.

use_travis()

This will provide a template of the .travis.yml file that will control the behavior of Travis.

  1. Create a .travis.yml file by running usethis::use_travis().

Also, you can add a Travis-CI badge to your README (that will be automatically updated).

  1. Add the markdown code for the Travis-CI badge to your README.Rmd file.

Since Travis-CI checking is triggered via GitHub, you have to push these files to the GitHub repository.

  1. Commit the .travis.yml file and the changes to the README files to GitHub.

Finally, Travis checking must be enable via the Travis-CI website.

  1. Enable Travis-CI checking for a repository that holds your package.

Getting credit

Please respond to the following prompt on Slack in the #lab-travis channel.

Prompt: What questions do you still have about R packages? What would you like to discuss next week?