knitr::opts_chunk$set( collapse = TRUE, comment = "#>" )
library(rhub)
Scenario: there's a bug in the check results of your package on a CRAN Linux platform, or you saw such a bug even before CRAN submission, by building your package on a R-hub Linux platform. How can you reproduce and fix the bug? Submitting to the R-hub platform (or the R-hub platform that's closest to the CRAN platform) after each tweak of your code would have a high turnaround so is not optimal for debugging. R-hub's Linux Docker images are available for you to use, so you can run the R-hub Linux builders locally.
Warning: at the moment, the functions are not tested on Windows! Bug reports are welcome :-)
To be able to use the feature, you will need to install Docker. Please
refer to Docker docs. On Windows,
installation might be trickier, check that your machine
meets the system requirements. On
Linux, make sure to
run the post-installation steps
to make the docker
command available to your user without the sudo
prefix.
If you are new to Docker, for the basic use shown in the next two sections you don't need to learn anything, you won't have to leave R. Nonetheless, if you're curious, this tutorial features a nice introduction. Also see this blog post and the list of resources it shows at the end.
Each of R-hub Linux platforms is associated to a Docker image, whose Dockerfile is stored in the r-hub/rhub-linux-builders repository, and that is built and available on Docker Hub. Note, if you're used to using Docker images outside of R, you might want to just refer to the information in R-hub Linux Docker images GitHub repository (including links to the built images on Docker Hub). The advantage of using the rhub package instead of Docker directly, is that the package will install the system requirements properly.
To list the available images from R, you can use the
local_check_linux_images()
function that returns a data.frame
and has a
pretty default printing.
imgs <- local_check_linux_images() imgs knitr::kable(imgs, row.names = FALSE)
Of particular interest are
the cranname
columns if you're trying to find an equivalent to a CRAN
platform;
the name
platform which is the ID you should use to select that
platform.
In theory, you could also use images that are not listed in the list above, e.g. your own Docker images.
Below we'll start a check of a package on the "rhub/debian-gcc-release" image (Debian Linux, R-release, GCC). The first time you use an image on your machine, it'll be downloaded from Docker Hub, which might take a while. The image won't be deleted after use, so next time will be faster until you clean up your machine's Docker images, which one should do once in a while (note that R-hub images are regularly updated).
pkg_path <- "/home/maelle/Documents/R-hub/test-packages/note" local_check_linux(pkg_path, image = "rhub/debian-gcc-release")
You can either just run the check as shown above, which will print a log to
the screen, including R CMD check
results in the end, or assign it to an
object:
pkg_path <- "/home/maelle/Documents/R-hub/test-packages/note" chk <- local_check_linux(pkg_path, image = "rhub/debian-gcc-release")
The object returned is of the class rcmdcheck::rcmdcheck
which is an S3
object with fields errors
, warnings
and notes
(character vectors),
that you could operate on if you wish.
The local_check_linux()
function creates a container (instance of the
image) that won't be deleted after use so you might want to clean up once
in a while.
If running checks in images iteratively isn't enough for your debugging,
you might want to run the container created by local_check_linux()
. Take
note of the container name and run (in a shell, not in R)
docker container start 7181196d-bc3c-4fc8-a0e8-dc511150335d-2 docker exec -it 7181196d-bc3c-4fc8-a0e8-dc511150335d-2 bash
where 7181196d-bc3c-4fc8-a0e8-dc511150335d-2
is the container name, this
is printed out by local_check_linux()
. After running these commands, you
will get a shell within the Docker container, where you can run R. Note
that on some containers R is installed in /opt/
.
For more information, you may want to look at the shell script that rhub
uses to set up the container for running the check. To find it, run the
code below.
system.file(package = "rhub", "bin", "rhub-linux-docker.sh")
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