Badge is Coool!

What happens when we change the Rmd file and commit?

In Blog 5 you had the first exposure to Github Actions. We just checked frontmatter compliance (as we do for this round). You see that we have added a second action - here, we are converting the Rmarkdown document to a markdown file by running render_rmarkdown on Github. This action passes successfully for this document. We want to do something similar for blog #4.

Now start reading …

Read the vignette Introduction to renv for the renv R package by Kevin Ushey.

Then do:

1. Install the R package renv on your local machine.

2. In the project for blog 4, initialize the workflow used by the renv package.

3. Add all dependencies to the environment (implicitly by installing all the depepndencies or explicilty by listing dependencies in a DESCRIPTION file).

4. Add the renv folder to your blog 4 repository, and push the changes.

5. Is the github action working? Read any potential error messages in the workflow and try to fix things. Make sure to check stackoverflow for help, don’t forget our Discussion board!

Yes! It’s working :)

Write a blog post addressing the following questions:

1. What is the idea of the renv package?

R package dependencies are easier to manage and reproducible environments are easier to create with the renv package. The use of renv means you will spend less time worrying about package version mismatches and more time developing or analyzing.

2. In 50 to 100 words describe your experience working with renv. What went well? What did not go so well?

Before I pushed the changes to my blog4 repo, I did a few things to make sure everything was in order.

First, I hit up “renv::init()” to get my R environment all set up for this project.

Then I called “renv::dependencies” to make sure all my package dependencies were good to go.

After that, I hit up “renv::snapshot()” to save my project library in case I needed to roll back my updates.

Next, I added “check-yaml.yaml” to my workflow folder because the badge code shows the status of the workflow defined in my “.github/workflows” directory. I also added “schema.json” and “schema.yaml” to my “.github” folder and copied and pasted the ymal and json code from blog 5.

That’s when I spotted a problem: the ymal in the read.rmd file for blog 4 was messed up. The dates weren’t in quotation marks ““, and the categories were spelled like”category.” So, I fixed those issues and pushed everything up to my repo. Easy peasy! I followed the same process for blog 6, and now both badges are showing “passing.”

Submit this blog post to your blog-6 repo.