Ignore a dependency during R CMD check

user_5420406 0
Viewed 173

I have a package that I developed to enable my team (and perhaps other interested users) to install and use a particular R package (RQDA) that was archived on CRAN. I have hosted this package on GitHub and am trying to set up GitHub Actions so that I have a CI workflow in place.

Whenever I run R CMD check locally everything is fine, but when I push to GitHub the build fails. This is because, by default, Actions tries to install that same (archived) package. Expectedly, this fails.

build failure

So, my question is this: is there a way I can disable the check for a specific package dependency? There are no plans to ever send this package to CRAN, so I am happy to bypass their package policy in this instance.

r-package github-actions r
2 Answers

2 possible ways:

  • Upload the source for RQDA to a Github repo, or other publicly accessible location, and put a Remotes: line in your DESCRIPTION file

  • Save the package to cloud storage, eg an S3 bucket or Azure storage container, and download it from there as a separate workflow step prior to checking

user_4743490

This is how I was able to deal with the problem:

The changes made were entirely in the workflow file at ./.github/workflows/. One of the jobs there is for installing R package dependencies for the project:

  - name: Install dependencies
    run: |
      remotes::install_deps(dependencies = TRUE)
      remotes::install_cran("rcmdcheck")
    shell: Rscript {0}

The first thing I did was to change the dependencies argument to NA so that only packages listed in Depends and Imports are installed. (The RQDA dependency that was giving me trouble is under Suggests).

There was still an error but this time with some guidance that involved going to the job Check and setting the environment variable _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_ to false.

The check now works as expected.

user_54204060
Related