Online Tool for Cran checks

Question

Even when I am afraid to be a bit off-topic, but I am not sure where else to ask this, sorry!

I am developing my R-package using a Linux system, hence I can run the R CMD check --as-cran command easily for Linux. For Windows it is also possible using a colleagues computer.

But how do you check your packages for MacOS? Or even worse, how to check for Solaris? I just ask, because I got an error there from the CRAN checks and most likely I won't be able to fix it without some try+error. But uploading new packages over and over until the error is fixed for MacOS can't be the solution...

Hence my question is, is there an online tool similar to win-builder (e.g. 'win-check.r-project.org' and 'macos-check.r-project.org' and so on), where you could check your package for all possible platforms, before submitting to cran? Unfortunately I do not know anybody who has a Mac, nor does Apple make it easy to install their OS on a x86 computer (I found the Hackintosh project, but it seems to be a bit shady...). Having such tools would make it much easier to fix certain issues in one's package.

Thanks for reading this!

Supat

you can set up a project on r-forge ... debugging is a pain in the butt, but you can at least find out whether and approximately how it's failing on different platforms ... – Gravimeter

Answer 1

There is now R-Hub (github page). Made possible by the R-Consortium.

r-hub is a multi-platform build and check service for R packages. This packages uses the r-hub API to connect to r-hub and start package checks on various architectures.

Sectional

Answer 2

No. There is currently no publicly available cross-platform checker available for R (with the possible exception of R-forge, which tends to be a bit unreliable)

Nancinancie

Maybe something in the wings though? ;) – Shall

Thanks for the 'no' - of course a positive answer is always nicer, but at least it saves me now from further searches.. I will also have a look on R-forge (also thanks to @Ben). – Supat

@Shall nothing concrete, but this is a major pain point for package developers and it is something I think could be much less painful – Nancinancie

Maybe travis on github could be configured to perform CHECK based on the most recent CRAN's test script? – Berga

@JanGorecki you'd need to install R-devel, which is possible, but painful – Nancinancie

"with the possible exception of R-forge" How would one use R-forge to perform CRAN checks? Could you please expand on this... – Roadrunner

I suggest an edit here. Your answer seems outdated given @phiver's answer. Doing so would give the consortium's platform a bit of a boost maybe as people follow advice of opinion leaders... Or did you not point to rhub on purpose? – Stony

Answer 3

Guess a bit late to the party - nevertheless https://builder.r-hub.io/ would probably be the place to go!

Toffic

Answer 4

You can use Travis and Appveyor.

Both work very nicely along with GitHub. Take my R package for example https://github.com/SteffenMoritz/imputeTS

Whenever I update something there, Travis makes a Linux build and Appveyor a Windows build.

See:

Travis-CI https://travis-ci.org/SteffenMoritz/imputeTS

and

Appveyor https://ci.appveyor.com/project/steffenmoritz/imputeTS

For open source projects both built services are free. You can see a lot of R packages on github using these two services. (e.g. https://github.com/robjhyndman/forecast)

For Mac I don't know of a build service.

Heartbreaker

What if it shows build passing but CRAN checks are actually showing an error? – Turncoat

Answer 5

As mentioned above there's now R-hub. In particular see its R client, the rhub package.

There's a part of the "Get started" vignette about CRAN submissions and a screencast about the same topic.

Disclaimer: I contribute to R-hub docs.

Cosmography

Answer 6

Yes, the macOS builder project can be used to run package checks on a macOS platform (see https://mac.r-project.org/macbuilder/submit.html).

Houdini