Continuous integration

You can configure lintr to run as part of continuous integration (either for a package or a general project containing R files) in order to automatically check that commits and pull requests do not deteriorate code style.

For packages

GitHub Actions

If your package is on GitHub, the easiest way to do this is with GitHub Actions. The workflow configuration files use YAML syntax. The usethis package has some great functionality that can help you with workflow files. The most straightforward way to add a lintr workflow to your package is to use the r-lib/actions’s lint example. To do this with usethis, you need to call

usethis::use_github_action("lint")

This will create a workflow file called lint.yaml and place it in the correct location, namely in the .github/workflows directory of your repository. This file configures all the steps required to run lintr::lint_package() on your package.

lintr-bot will then add comments to the commit or pull request with the lints found and they will also be printed as annotations along side the status check on GitHub. If you want to disable the commenting you can set the environment variable LINTR_COMMENT_BOT=false. Additionally, if you want the builds to produce an error instead of just a warning, you can set the environment variable LINTR_ERROR_ON_LINT=true. Note that this will kill the R process in case of a lint.

If your project is in a subdirectory and you would like to use GitHub Actions annotations, you can set options(lintr.github_annotation_project_dir = "path/to/project") which will make sure that the annotations point to the correct paths.

Travis CI

If you want to run lintr on Travis-CI, you will need to have Travis install the package first. This can be done by adding the following line to your .travis.yml

r_github_packages:
  - r-lib/lintr

We recommend running lintr::lint_package() as an after_success step in your build process]

Just like with GitHub Actions, lintr-bot will then add comments to the commit or pull request with the lints found and they will also be printed on Travis-CI. The environment variables LINTR_COMMENT_BOT and LINTR_ERROR_ON_LINT mentioned for GitHub actions also work with Travis CI builds.

Non-failing Lints

after_success:
  - R CMD INSTALL $PKG_TARBALL
  - Rscript -e 'lintr::lint_package()'

Live example of a package using this setup: hibpwned, lintr-bot commenting on a PR.

For projects

You are not limited you using lintr for packages – you can use it in combination with continuous integration for any other project.

GitHub Actions

If your project is on GitHub, you could take advantage of GitHub Actions and the usethis functionality. r-lib/actions includes a lint-project example, which you can use by calling:

usethis::use_github_action("lint-project")

Super-Linter

lintr powers R lints for Super-Linter and MegaLinter, which provide a unified linting experience across many languages. Specifically, they execute lintr::lint() on the R and R Markdown files included in a given project.