actions

Collection of GitHub Actions workflows used by the Predictive Ecology group to test packages, SpaDES modules, and render SpaDES module manuals.

Which ref to use

Use @main. That is what every caller in this organisation is on, and it is what these actions are tested against.

This reverses earlier advice in this file, which recommended a version tag or a pinned SHA on the grounds that tags can move. The reasoning was sound in the abstract and wrong in practice here: a pin does not freeze correct behaviour, it freezes whatever was true on the day, including the bugs and including the parts of the outside world the action reaches for.

The concrete case. Every published tag — v0.1 through v0.5 — still has install-spatial-deps adding the ubuntugis-unstable PPA, which installs a GDAL that is ABI-incompatible with the Posit binaries the R packages are built against on noble. main dropped that PPA. A caller pinned to a tag for stability gets a broken geospatial toolchain and no way to notice; that is what took quickPlot's revdeps workflow out of service.

Pins also rot silently in a second way: they are the reason v0.1-v0.5 cannot be retired. Seventy-four module repositories still reference them.

@main moves, and that is the point — fixes reach callers. It is not unguarded: self-test.yaml exercises the composite actions on every push and pull request, and the reusable workflows are used by this organisation's own packages, so a break surfaces immediately rather than at the next release.

Pin a SHA only when you have a specific reason to hold a version, and expect to revisit it.

See NEWS.md for the changes at each tag.

Reusable workflows

These are the primary interface. A caller supplies its triggers and any overrides; the matrix, system dependencies, caching and pins live here. See each file's header comment for its inputs.

workflow	what it does
R-CMD-check.yaml	the check matrix, incl. a _R_CHECK_DEPENDS_ONLY_ leg
test-coverage.yaml	covr, uploaded with codecov-action (caller passes CODECOV_TOKEN)
test-downstream.yaml	check downstream packages against the branch under test
pkgdown.yaml	build the site and deploy to gh-pages
revdeps.yaml	reverse dependency checks (wraps revdeps-check)
citation.yaml	regenerate CITATION.cff from DESCRIPTION
render-module-rmd.yaml	render a SpaDES module's .Rmd and commit the result

jobs:
  R-CMD-check:
    uses: PredictiveEcology/actions/.github/workflows/R-CMD-check.yaml@main
    secrets: inherit

Composite actions

The building blocks the workflows above are made of. Use them directly only when no reusable workflow fits. For details and example usage see each action's README.

1. install-Require - installs Require (and remotes);
2. install-Rmd-pkgs - installs packages commonly needed to render SpaDES module manuals;
3. install-SpaDES - installs SpaDES packages;
4. install-spatial-deps - system dependencies for geospatial packages on Ubuntu Linux and macOS;
5. setup-r-deps - R, pandoc, system deps and the package dependency cache in one step;
6. stage-gdrive-auth - stage a Google Drive credential for tests that need one;
7. revdeps-check - run reverse dependency checks for R packages;

More information on GitHub Actions

https://github.com/r-lib/actions