Continuous Integration (Hudson/Jenkins) and R Programming

23
votes

Does anyone know of a way to do continuous integration with R programming? I'm aware of tools like the svUnit package to do the unit tests, but has anyone tried to run these with Hudson/Jenkins?

3
unit-testingrcontinuous-integrationhudsonjenkins
+1 I am interested in this as well, in order to automatically catch package updates from CRAN that break my tests. I wish I could easily send a bunch of tests upstream, to assist package developers, but automating tests will do for now. - Iterator
just wondering whether @Iterator or Travis tried out the latest svUnit. according to me svUnit offers '''very good''' integration in Jenkins, so seeing Dirks answer being "accepted" makes me think you have not yet taken advance of it. - mariotomo
@mariotomo - Thanks for the alert - I'll definitely check it out. I have an upcoming project that will need to use such testing. - Iterator

3 Answers

12
votes

I do not see any particular problem. These things tend to be scripted so could just

  • point to the top of your repository
  • N minutes after each checkin, loop over source directories
  • invoke R CMD check on each
  • your package has to be set to use unit test, for which you can use
    • RUnit which is the initial unit testing for R ; it is widely used
    • testthat which is a newer package by Hadley, and used by many of his packages
    • svUnit by Philippe which AFAIK never caught on quite as much as the other two.

That is really not any different from continuous integration with compiled languages. Your question is really about how to do unit testing within R, and that question has been covered before.

5
votes

at office we have been using Hudson/Jenkins for quite a while. I have contributed integration of svUnit to Jenkins so I would strongly advise you to use svUnit before trying anything else.

have a look at the two libraries I maintain: logging and delftfews or at myself trying to follow zoo and redistribute it on github.

I have not been doing housekeeping recently so the three scripts (in zoo, logging, delftfews) are all slightly different. the one in my zoo version will stop if any test fails. this is practical when you are running R CMD check, but probably less of a good idea when doing continuous integration.

1
votes

Hudson/Jenkins supports running bash scripts. I think that you can use this as an entrance to your R world. In R, a simple way to keep result is to use sink("toYourFile.txt") and then use CI's result display function to show the toYourFile.txt.