Could we add a point in the docs about setting up CI ? about rcall.jl HOT 6 OPEN

Agreed! I just had a similar experience struggling to figure out how to use RCall in the automatic testing environment with github actions (locally, testing run smoothly). Considering that one huge use case of RCall is to compare the results of your Julia implementation with the results from a given R package, it would be extremely helpful to have it documented how to set up the automatic testing environment so that RCall works.

from rcall.jl.

I'm not opposed to adding some tips to the docs in a section titled something like "Using RCall in CI". Two other places to look for examples:

• RCall's own CI setup
• JellyMe4's CI setup

from rcall.jl.

@evangorstein could you share your setup ? Mine is unfortunately still in private repo but will be released soon

from rcall.jl.

I ended up copy-pasting from the workflow for MonotoneSplines.jl that you linked to. That is, I included the following in my workflow file

      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v2
        with:
          r-version: ${{ matrix.r-version }}
      # actually it seems that without installing `libcurl4-openssl-dev`, there also exists a libcurl.so, but at `/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4` instead of `/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4`
      # for consistency with previous setting and also recommended at https://github.com/r-lib/actions/tree/v2/setup-r-dependencies, continue to install `libcurl4-openssl-dev`
      - name: Install libcurl on Linux
        if: runner.os == 'Linux'
        run: sudo apt-get update -y && sudo apt-get install -y libcurl4-openssl-dev
      - name: Install Dependencies for R
        run: |
          r = getOption("repos")
          r["CRAN"] = "https://cloud.r-project.org/"
          options(repos=r)
          install.packages("some_package")
        shell: sudo Rscript {0}

and then later

      - uses: julia-actions/julia-runtest@v1
        env:
          LD_PRELOAD: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4
          LD_LIBRARY_PATH: /opt/R/${{ matrix.r-version }}/lib/R/lib

I'm not sure whether all of this is necessary, but I included it all just in case.

from rcall.jl.

Just to give a small status update since this is runing on a private repo EDIT: not anymore got published, the file is there. The way of setting R packages that i used (the r-lib/actions/setup-r-dependencies@v2 action) gives automatic caching of them from a run to the next and is the actual recomended way of doing this.

However I still struggle to get it stable : it installs the last version of every R package each times, which is known to be buggy, and in 3 weeks I had to upload the R version twice from 4.1 to 4.3 to 4.4.0 now... Maybe there is something that could be done to freeze package versions with R::renv but I was not able to make it work.

from rcall.jl.

I also recently struggled with this, mostly to make Julia RCall find the path to R under macos-latest. It worked with this setup.

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