Using devtools::check() to account for private packages?

[ijlyttle]

Hi all,

I am developing packages for internal use at my company, so for the LICENSE field of my DESCRIPTION file looks something like:

License: Confidential and Proprietary to Acme, Inc.

When I use devtools::check() or hit the "Check" button in the RStudio IDE, I have come to expect a warning that my license is non-standard.

As a result, I consider

0 errors ✔ | 1 warning ✖ | 0 notes ✔

to be a success.

This is OK for me as a work around, but it might not work if I am using an internal CI service.

My question is: is there a way to specify to the "checker" to ignore the license, or to add another permitted licence in this context?

Thanks!

[jimhester]

The license check is coming from R CMD check, so you can disable it by setting the environment variable _R_CHECK_LICENSE_=false. You may also want to try maybe, see https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-ints.html#Tools for details.

[ijlyttle]

Thanks Jim!

I have looked at a couple of different strategies for adding the line

_R_CHECK_LICENSE_=FALSE

to a .Renviron file:

1. Add it to the file in my home directory: I can get this to work robustly, but I may miss problems on open-source packages. This is not a show-stopper because Travis will find problems when I push to GitHub.

2. Create a .Renviron file specific to the root directory of any internal package (and add it to .Rbuildignore) - then put the line in. This limits the behavior to that package, but I lose all the variables I set in my "home" .Renviron. I understand that R considers no more than one .Renviron file.

I think solution (1) will work OK for me, but I wanted to ask the followon question - is there a way to direct a project .Renviron file to refer also to the "home" .Renviron file? If the answer is no, that's OK

Thanks again!

[cderv]

@ijlyttle

is there a way to direct a project .Renviron file to refer also to the "home" .Renviron file? If the answer is no, that's OK

if you use readRenviron() you can manage that. You can put something in your project .Rprofile or just in a script

Either load both Renviron

readRenviron("~/.Renviron")
readRenviron("./.Renviron")

or use a custom file to store your check related environment file and load this one before checking

readRenviron("check.env")

where check.env is

_R_CHECK_LICENSE_=FALSE

i think this should work. Most of the time... the only drawback is that some variable expansion are not done (like %V or %p for lib path - pretty annoying but it is like that).

Also, do not forget you have a env_vars argument in devtools::check(), specifically for this kind of use case. I think this is used that way

devtools::check(env_vars = c(_R_CHECK_LICENSE_= FALSE))

This would be the simpler for those variable dedicated to checking .

Hope it helps

[ijlyttle]

Hi Christophe,

This is super, thanks!