renv

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.

1b. Go to your blog 4 repo, and run the command usethis::use_github_action("render-rmarkdown.yaml") This creates the file render-rmarkdown.yaml inside the folder .github/workflows in your repo. Add it to the repository and push it.

1c. Optional - but maybe educational: make a change to your Rmd file with the blog post (just a small change), and push it. Then go to your github site and watch the render-rmarkdown action fail.

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!

Write a blog post addressing the following questions:

1. What is the idea of the renv package?

The renv package helps with one piece of reproducibility by recording the versions of R and packages that our project is running on. It also can make it easier to reinstall the version of those packages for a specific project that has had its versions recorded using renv.

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

It was really cool to be able to run just a couple functions to record version numbers of R and the packages my project was dependent on. There were a lot of debugging along the way, though. Lessons learned: make sure to add renv.lock to the git repo, and try a newer version of a package if you get an error like Error: install of package 'stringi' failed [error code 1]. In general, the downside of using renv was that the error messages were not as informative as I would’ve liked, there weren’t really stackoverflow posts addressing my errors, and the vignette for the package could’ve been more informative about troubleshooting/error messages.

Submit this blog post to your blog-6 repo.