In the previous post, we looked at how to easily automate R analysis, modeling, and development work for free using GitLab’s CI/CD. Together with the fantastic R-hub project, we can use GitLab CI/CD to do much more. In this post, we will take it to the next level by using R-hub to test our development work on many different platforms such as multiple Linux setups, MS Windows and MacOS.
Automating the execution, testing and deployment of R work is a very powerful tool to ensure the reproducibility, quality and overall robustness of the code that we are building, be it for data analysis and modeling purposes, developing R packages or even blogging. Modern tools also provide a free an easy to use way of achieving this goal. In this post, we will show a quick and simple way to automate R data analysis and package development checking, testing and installation with GitLab CI/CD and provide example files that can be used for testing packages and deploying blogdown-based websites.