Session info from R/Travis

For the problem I reported yesterday, in which my R package was working fine locally but failing on Travis, the key solution is to run update.packages(ask=FALSE) locally, and maybe even update.packages(ask=FALSE, type="source") to be sure to grab the source of packages for which binaries are not yet available. I now know to do that.

In addition, it’d be useful to have session information (R and package versions) in the results from Travis. This has proven a bit tricky.

If you don’t want to go with a fully custom Travis script, your customization options are limited. We really only care about the case of a failure, so after_success is not of interest, and after_script seems not to be run if there’s a Travis fail. Moreover, script and after_failure are defined by the main language: r script, so you can’t change them without going all-custom.

What’s left is before_script.

I want to see the result of devtools::session_info() with the package of interest loaded, but the package actually gets built after before_script is run, so we’ll need to build and install it, even though it’ll be built and installed again afterwards. The best I could work out is in this example .travis.yml file, with the key bits being:

before_script:
  - export PKG_NAME=$(Rscript -e 'cat(paste0(devtools::as.package(".")$package))')
  - export PKG_TARBALL=$(Rscript -e 'pkg <- devtools::as.package("."); cat(paste0(pkg$package,"_",pkg$version,".tar.gz"))')
  - R CMD build --no-build-vignettes .
  - R CMD INSTALL ${PKG_TARBALL}
  - rm ${PKG_TARBALL}
  - echo "Session info:"
  - Rscript -e "library(${PKG_NAME});devtools::session_info('${PKG_NAME}')"

I use --no-build-vignettes in R CMD build as otherwise the package would be built and installed yet another time. And I remove the .tar.gz file afterwards, to avoid having the later check complain about the extra file.

Here’s an example of the session info in the Travis log.

If you have suggests about how to simplify this, I’d be happy to hear them. I guess the key would be to have the main Travis script for R revised to report session information.

Thanks to Jenny Bryan for showing me how to search for instances of session_info in .travis.yml files on GitHub, and to Carson Sievert for further moral support.