tic & CI Client Packages - An Overview

Patrick Schratz, Kirill Müller

Introduction

Most of the setup work that needs to be done for specific CI systems is handled by the respective R client packages such as {circle}. These enable the repo on the CI system and ensure that deployment permissions are granted.

After everything has been set up, the rest of the work goes to {tic}.

• Creation of the CI YAML templates.
• Which steps are going to be run.
• Deployment: Yes/no

In essence, tic::use_tic() is a wrapper for creating CI YAML templates and setting up deployment on the CI systems which is powered by the client packages.

CI Client Packages

Currently, the following CI client packages exist:

• {circle}

The client package for travis was archived in November 2020.

For Appveyor there is r-appveyor from Kirill Müller. This project makes it possible in the first place to run R checks on Appveyor but does not provide access to the Appveyor API and is not used by {tic} currently. Also, it does not come with automation for deployment setup. Appveyor support has been removed from {tic} in December 2020 due to a strong focus on GitHub Actions.

For GitHub Actions there is {ghactions} from Max Held which comes with functions helping to set up YAML templates and other convenience. It does not provide API access and is not used by {tic} currently.