Tutorial: GitLab CI/CD via components

Package development
1

The vast majority of package developers use GitHub, however I know some (e.g. me!) prefer GitLab.

There is an existing approach, using R-Hub, to perform CI/CD with GitLab, see Setting up continuous multi-platform R package building, checking and testing with R-Hub, Docker and GitLab CI/CD for free, with a working example - Jozef's Rblog

But, GitLab offers free compute minutes, too. To that end, I've partially ported r-lib/actions to GitLab CI/CD 'Components'.

GitLab CI/CD via Components: https://gitlab.com/stephematician/r-gitlab-ci

To use in a GitLab CI/CD pipeline, we add each component via include: component in the .gitlab-ci.yml of our package, and then we place !reference tags into before_script and script nodes of jobs, e.g.:

include:
  # always include the gitlab_ci_utility component
  - component: $CI_SERVER_FQDN/stephematician/r-gitlab-ci/gitlab_ci_utility@0.0.1
  - component: $CI_SERVER_FQDN/stephematician/r-gitlab-ci/setup_r@0.0.1

# we can switch between powershell and bash here:
variables:
  CMD: "bash"

# a job to check a package that has no dependencies:
check_package_job:
  before_script:
    - !reference [ .gitlab_ci_utilty-${CMD}, before_script ]
    - !reference [ .setup_r-${CMD}, before_script ]
  script:
    - !reference [ .setup_r-${CMD}, script ]
    - |
      Rscript -e '
        install.packages("devtools")
        devtools::check()
      '

Hope this is helpful to someone, and if nothing else, it was a fun exercise in learning node.js and CI/CD!

2 Likes
2

Thanks for sharing @stephematician, and welcome to the community!

Best,
Randy

3

Now that GitLab CI/CD steps are finally looking like a thing :tada: ; I'll see if I can re-factor these so that they are a little less messy to use.

1 Like