The rOpenSci R-universe is a bit special as, compared to other R-universes, it builds docs for all the packages in our suite.Looking at the dashboard helps us identify failures in building the packages as well as in building the pkgdown websites.We then help authors fix these issues in order to comply with our package curation policy.As a package author you should also rely on continuous integration in your own repo for catching e.g. R CMD check

What is renv RStudio’s renv package is a powerful dependency management toolkit for R. It allows you to create a lockfile that records the exact versions of R packages used in a given project, and provides tooling to install exactly those same versions on another machine, or at a later point in time. This is very useful to create an isolated project environment for reproducibility or production purposes.

Continuous deployment in r-universe A major difference between r-universe and static repositories like CRAN and BioConductor is continuous deployment: packages in r-universe are continuously built in CI and immediately deployed to our package server. This package server stores binaries and metadata in a database, which enables us to dynamically query and expose all the package data through APIs, dashboards, feeds, etc.

When GitHub announced support for CITATION.cfffiles I though ofcreating a package that would assist R developers in this matter. I was alreadyusing codemetar for most of my packages,so I was familiar with the creation of these kind of metadata files.

Badges in r-universe After creating your personal universe, the dashboard on https://{yourname}.r-universe.dev shows the version and other details for each package in your repository. We have also added a new tab that lists the available badges for the repository.

TLDR: As of today, the pkgdown sites for all rOpenSci packages on our docs server are built on r-universe. This is an internal change; no action is required for package maintainers.From Jenkins to r-universe For the past 2 years we have been using a Jenkins server to automatically build the pkgdown sites for all rOpenSci packages, which get published on https://docs.ropensci.org.

R-universe: your personal R space The r-universe platform provides users and organizations with a personal CRAN-like repository for publishing software, rmarkdown articles, and other content that fits in an R package.

Browsing articles on R-universe In the past weeks we have extended the R-universe build system and front-ends with some new features for publishing articles . Articles can be used for documentation of R packages, but also for other purposes, such as reports, tutorials, papers, or research compendia.Publishing of articles in R-universe is based on the R vignette system, and we may add support for other types of articles later on. The

The R-universe build system The R-universe system is a complex effort, consisting of numerous frontend and backend pieces that operate across various platforms. A key challenge in developing such a system is managing overall complexity by finding ways to reduce the problem into smaller, loosely coupled components, which can be thought of, and developed, somewhat independently.

At rOpenSci, we encourage R package developers to take advantage of Continuous Integration services to automatically check the package on different platforms, with different versions of R. The rOpenSci dev guide dedicates chapter 2 to the topic of Continuous Integration Best Practices , and recommends a few common CI vendors, including Travis CI. Travis CI has been a pioneer in free public CI services, and made the concept popular in the