How do I set up Travis for non-package code?

Question

I would like to set up Travis CI for an R project hosted on Github that isn’t a package. Unfortunately, the official R Travis support seems to be pretty hard-wired to packages (which, to be fair, makes sense).

Is there any chance to get this working for non-package code, or is my only recourse to branch r-travis and patch it according to my specifications? I don’t feel competent enough to do this easily.

Here’s my failing Travis configuration:

language: R

r_github_packages:
    - klmr/modules

r_binary_packages:
    - testthat

script: make test

This fails with the following error:

The command "Rscript -e 'deps <- devtools::install_deps(dependencies = TRUE);if (!all(deps %in% installed.packages())) { message("missing: ", paste(setdiff(deps, installed.packages()), collapse=", ")); q(status = 1, save = "no")}'" failed and exited with 1 during .

This makes sense: devtools::install_deps only works in the context of a package.

I’ve tried suppressing the installation step, by adding install: true to my configuration. However, now the dependencies are no longer installed, and the build consequently fails with

Error in loadNamespace(name) : there is no package called ‘modules’

Answer 1

It turns out that a naïve approach is fairly easy; the following (complete .travis.yml) works for my purposes:

language: R

install:
    - Rscript -e 'install.packages(c("devtools", "testthat"))'
    - Rscript -e 'devtools::install_github("klmr/modules")'

script: make test

However, I’d still prefer a solution that can actually use the Travis declarations (r_binary_packages, etc.) instead of having to install dependencies manually.