Contributing

Thanks for your interest in contributing to workflowr. Here are some guidelines to help make it easier to merge your Pull Request:

  • For potentially large changes, please open an Issue first to discuss
  • Please follow the Hadley style guide
  • Please run the file scripts/contribute.R to check your changes
  • (Optional) Run devtools::test() to run the tests
  • (Optional) Add new test(s) in tests/testthat/

If you’re new to submitting Pull Requests, please read the section Contribute to other projects in the tutorial A quick introduction to version control with Git and GitHub.

Setup a development environment

To contribute to workflowr, follow these steps to setup a development environment:

  1. Fork GitHub repository and clone to your local machine

  2. Install dependencies

    # Install package dependencies
if (!requireNamespace("remotes", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_deps(dependencies = TRUE)

# Install developlment-only dependencies
install.packages("devtools")

# Install local copy of workflowr
devtools::install()

More about this repository

For the most part, I try to follow the guidelines from R packages by Hadley Wickham. The unit tests are performed with testthat, the documentation is built with roxygen2, and the online package documentation is created with pkgdown.

Minimal continuous integration testing is performed by GitHub Actions for each push to the repository. Extensive continuous integration testing is performed at scheduled intervals in workflowr-pkg-tests. Code coverage is calculated with covr and Codecov. The online package documentation is automatically generated by running pkgdown from GitHub Actions and pushing to the gh-pages branch.

The template files used by wflow_start() to populate a new project are defined in the list templates in the file R/infrastructure.R. The RStudio project template is configured by inst/rstudio/templates/project/wflow_start.dcf. The repository contains the files LICENSE and LICENSE.md to both adhere to R package conventions for defining the license and also to make the license clear in a more conventional manner (suggestions for improvement welcome). The directory scripts/ contains convenience scripts for maintaining the R package. The remaining directories are standard for R packages as described in the manual Writing R Extensions.

Scripts for maintaining the package

Convenience scripts for maintaining the package are located in scripts/. These are not included in the package tarball for distribution. They are all intended to be executed from the root directory of the package. The convenience scripts include:

  • build.sh runs R CMD build and R CMD check
  • bump-version.R bumps the version across all the necessary package files
  • contribute.R performs some basic checks that should be run before contributing a Pull Request
  • document.R regenerates the documentation
  • gather-dependencies.R extracts the dependencies from DESCRIPTION to create the vector dependencies in R/zzz.R (which is used to confirm that all the packages that workflowr needs are properly installed)
  • sed.sh performs search/replace for all R files in the package

Release checklist (for maintainers)

  • Bump version with scripts/bump-version.R

  • Update NEWS.md: Check git log and make sure to reference GitHub Issues/PRs

  • Check spelling with spelling::spell_check_package() and update inst/CITATION as needed

  • Run scripts/document.R to update Rd files, install the package locally, and preview the online documentation with pkgdown (No need to commit docs/ because the pkgdown site is rebuilt and deployed automatically by GitHub Pages after each push)

  • Run scripts/build.sh to confirm tests pass locally

  • Test on rhub:

    • Have to validate email first with rhub::validate_email(). Copy-paste token from email into R console
    • Check on Ubuntu with rhub::check_for_cran(platform = "ubuntu-gcc-devel")
    • Check on Solaris with rhub::check_for_cran(platform = "solaris-x86-patched")

  • Test on winbuilder:

    • Check with R devel with devtools::check_win_devel()

  • Update cran-comments.md

  • Commit with git commit -am "Bump version: x.x.x.x -> x.x.x"

  • Push with git push origin main and wait for CI builds to pass

  • Build tarball with R CMD build . and upload to CRAN submission site. You will receive an email to request confirmation, then an email confirming the package was submitted, and then an email with the test results. Once it is accepted to CRAN, monitor the check results for any surprise errors. Also, these builds are when the binaries are built for Windows and macOS, so they aren’t available until they are finished. You will receive an email once all the Windows binaries are available for download (devel, release, oldrel).

  • You can monitor the status of the CRAN submission with the foghorn package:

    foghorn::cran_incoming("workflowr")
foghorn::cran_details("workflowr")
foghorn::cran_results(pkg = "workflowr")

  • Tag with git tag -a vx.x.x. Summarize NEWS.md entry into bullet points. Run git tag -l -n9 for past examples. Push with git push origin --tags.

  • Make a release. On GitHub, go to Releases -> Tags -> Edit release notes. Name the release “workflowr x.x.x” and copy-paste the Markdown entry from NEWS.md.