Online Tool for Cran checks

Question

Even when I am afraid to be a bit off-topic, but I am not sure where else to ask this, sorry!

I am developing my R-package using a Linux system, hence I can run the R CMD check --as-cran command easily for Linux. For Windows it is also possible using a colleagues computer.

But how do you check your packages for MacOS? Or even worse, how to check for Solaris? I just ask, because I got an error there from the CRAN checks and most likely I won't be able to fix it without some try+error. But uploading new packages over and over until the error is fixed for MacOS can't be the solution...

Hence my question is, is there an online tool similar to win-builder (e.g. 'win-check.r-project.org' and 'macos-check.r-project.org' and so on), where you could check your package for all possible platforms, before submitting to cran? Unfortunately I do not know anybody who has a Mac, nor does Apple make it easy to install their OS on a x86 computer (I found the Hackintosh project, but it seems to be a bit shady...). Having such tools would make it much easier to fix certain issues in one's package.

Thanks for reading this!

Answer 1

There is now R-Hub (github page). Made possible by the R-Consortium.

r-hub is a multi-platform build and check service for R packages. This packages uses the r-hub API to connect to r-hub and start package checks on various architectures.

Answer 2

No. There is currently no publicly available cross-platform checker available for R (with the possible exception of R-forge, which tends to be a bit unreliable)

Answer 3

You can use Travis and Appveyor.

Both work very nicely along with GitHub. Take my R package for example https://github.com/SteffenMoritz/imputeTS

Whenever I update something there, Travis makes a Linux build and Appveyor a Windows build.

See:

Travis-CI https://travis-ci.org/SteffenMoritz/imputeTS

and

Appveyor https://ci.appveyor.com/project/steffenmoritz/imputeTS

For open source projects both built services are free. You can see a lot of R packages on github using these two services. (e.g. https://github.com/robjhyndman/forecast)

For Mac I don't know of a build service.

Answer 4

As mentioned above there's now R-hub. In particular see its R client, the rhub package.

There's a part of the "Get started" vignette about CRAN submissions and a screencast about the same topic.

Disclaimer: I contribute to R-hub docs.

Answer 5

Guess a bit late to the party - nevertheless https://builder.r-hub.io/ would probably be the place to go!

Answer 6

Yes, the macOS builder project can be used to run package checks on a macOS platform (see https://mac.r-project.org/macbuilder/submit.html).