More and more R packages access resources on the web, and play crucial roles in workflows.Examples from the rOpenSci suite of packages include rromeo, GSODR, qualtRics, rnassqs, and many, many others.Like for all other packages, appropriate unit testing can make them more robust.However, unit testing of these packages can bring special challenges: dependence of tests on a good internet connection, testing in the absence of authentication

A new version of vcr was just released. See the release notes for all the details. I want to highlight a few of the more notable changes. New contributor vcr has a new author: Maëlle Salmon. She has been contributing to the package quite a lot lately, including many documentation improvements and big updates to the HTTP Testing in R which covers vcr in addition to some other packages.

Testing is a crucial component to any software package. Testing makes surethat your code does what you expect it to do; and importantly, makes it safer to makechanges moving forward because a good test suite will tell you if a change has brokenexisting functionality. Our recent community call on testing is a niceplace to get started with testing. One way to make testing even harder is through including HTTP requests.

R package test suites that include HTTP requests are dependent on an internet connection being up, the internet connection speed, changing behavior of the remote server, as well as changing response formats/data from a remote server. We ideally want to test functionality of our package relative to some known data that isn’t intermittently unavailable or changing.