tl;dr: You should care about R-hub if you care about R CMD check, on all operating systems, for free, and don’t ever want to leave R.

So, why use the R-hub package builder?

It is useful

As an R package developer, you probably regularly use R CMD check to detect common problems in your package, and you might even love that command. You might run it locally, or on a continuous integration platform such as Travis (Linux, macOS) or Appveyor (Windows). That’s great!

Now, how can you add a platform to your arsenal once in a while, or make sure your package will behave correctly on CRAN’s platforms? No need to borrow someone’s machine or to tweak your machine or a continuous integration config file: the R-hub package builder is there for you! R CMD check as a service on all operating systems, with platforms corresponding to different settings.

You do not need to leave R

There is an R client, rhub, allowing to manage your package builds on R-hub platforms from your R console! By default, you can follow along how your package build is going:

Here’s how you’d prepare a CRAN submission by submitting your package to all 3 recommended platforms, before getting a summary of results ready to be copy-pasted into your cran-comments.md file.

chk <- check_for_cran()
# wait a bit
chk$cran_summary()
#> Updating status...
#> ## Test environments
#> - R-hub fedora-clang-devel (r-devel)
#>  - R-hub windows-x86_64-devel (r-devel)
#>  - R-hub ubuntu-gcc-release (r-release)
#> 
#> ## R CMD check results
#> ❯ On fedora-clang-devel (r-devel), windows-x86_64-devel (r-devel), ubuntu-gcc-release (r-release)
#>   checking CRAN incoming feasibility ... NOTE
#>   Maintainer: ‘Maëlle Salmon <maelle.salmon@yahoo.se>’
#>   
#>   New submission
#>   
#>   The Description field contains
#>     <http://http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#The-DESCRIPTION-file>
#>   Please enclose URLs in angle brackets (<...>).
#>   
#>   The Date field is over a month old.
#> 
#> ❯ On fedora-clang-devel (r-devel), windows-x86_64-devel (r-devel), ubuntu-gcc-release (r-release)
#>   checking R code for possible problems ... NOTE
#>   .bello: no visible global function definition for ‘tail’
#>   Undefined global functions or variables:
#>     tail
#>   Consider adding
#>     importFrom("utils", "tail")
#>   to your NAMESPACE file.
#> 
#> 0 errors ✔ | 0 warnings ✔ | 2 notes ✖

Find out more about rhub!

So many platforms!

Here is a view of R-hub platforms at the moment of writing.

knitr::kable(rhub::platforms(), row.names = FALSE)

Noteworthy is the presence of

• 4 operating systems;

• platforms mimicking CRAN platforms as well as possible;

• sanitizers for compiled code!

If you feel overwhelmed now (19 platforms!), fear not, we’ve written some guidance about choosing one R-hub platform.

It is free and open-source

Most of R-hub’s components are open-source, check out our GitHub organization! And all of it is accessible for free for all members of the community.

There is more (to come)

At the moment, you’d be forgiven for thinking R-hub == R-hub package builder, but stay tuned, because there’s more to come for R-hub, and for its documentation! To mention a further feature that’s already at your disposal, R-hub Linux Docker images are available for you to check your package with locally… without leaving R, once again.

Now what?

We hope you care about R-hub, and now what? Well please keep using the service, provide feedback about user experience, bugs, docs, etc. in rhub repo and ask questions on gitter. R-hub is a project for the R community, let’s keep improving it together!