Automating the execution, testing and deployment of R code is a powerful tool to ensure the reproducibility, quality and overall robustness of the code that we are building. A relatively recent feature in GitHub - GitHub actions - allows us to do just that without using additional tools such as Travis or Jenkins for our repositories stored on GitHub. In this post, we will examine using GitHub actions and Docker to test our R packages across platforms in a portable way and show how this setup works for the CRAN package languageserversetup.
Over the past years, R has been gaining popularity, bringing to life new tools to with ith it. Thanks to the amazing work by contributors implementing the Language Server Protocol for R and writing Visual Studio Code Extensions for R, the most popular development environment amongst developers across the world now has very strong support for R as well. In this post, we will look at the languageserversetup package that aims to make the setup of the R Language Server robust and easy to use by installing it into a separate, independent library and adjusting R startup in a way that initializes the language server when relevant.