upnews

Display news and upgrade outdated GitHub R packages

Motivation

Get a similar output as the RStudio Update button for CRAN packages, but for GitHub ones.

Installation

You can install the released version of upnews from github

Console version

if (!requireNamespace("remotes")) install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("ginolhac/upnews")

With add-in

if (!requireNamespace("remotes")) install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("ginolhac/upnews", dependencies = TRUE)

Procedure

This add-in will fetch the remote HEAD sha1 of local github packages and compare them, to the remote HEAD (same branch). If some packages are outdated, fetch and display a link to a NEWS file (case insensitive NEWS.md). If the Ref is a commit, all branches are tested to find out from which branch it originate from.

Usage and ouput

Console

> upnews::upnews()
fetching 23 distant sha1
   |++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++| 100% elapsed = 05s
4 outdated pkgs (23 gh pkgs)
fetching news...
no news for jeroen/credentials/master
# A tibble: 4 x 7
  pkgs               loc_version gh_version local          remote         date       news                                                           
* <chr>              <chr>       <chr>      <chr>          <chr>          <chr>      <chr>                                                          
1 ginolhac/bifag     0.1.3.990   0.1.3.990  master@d490355 master@362992a 2018-11-07 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ginolhac/bifag/master/NEWS.md
2 jeroen/credentials 0.1         0.1        master@c9a4197 master@e1b2d9d 2018-11-13 NA                                                             
3 r-lib/pkgbuild     1.0.2.9000  1.0.2.9000 master@aec4654 master@6e4ebdf 2018-10-28 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/r-lib/pkgbuild/master/NEWS.md
4 tidyverse/rlang    0.3.0.9000  0.3.0.9000 master@f6a719a master@b8566db 2018-11-14 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/r-lib/rlang/master/NEWS.md

RStudio add-in

• use the upnews link in the Addins menu.
• in the console, a progress bar display the retrieval of remote HEAD
• finally a DataTable output is displayed:

• the package name has a pophover text with user/pkg and a link to the GitHub repo
• loc_version is from the DESCRIPTION local file, and a pophover text displays branch/commit
• gh_version is from the DESCRIPTION remote file, and a pophover text displays branch/commit
• date is the last commit date

when the green buttons are used, NEWS.md are fetched and rendered in modals:

• Demo GIF below:

increase limits to the GITHUB API

If you need more request to the GitHub API, you must be authenticated. Then, the limit is 5,000 requests per hour instead of 60.

To authenticate yourself, you can follow the great happygitwithr bookdown by Jenny Bryan. The specific chapter about the GITHUB_PAT env variable is here. Brefly:

• create a token with no rights on GitHub
• write this token in your ~/.Renviron file
• from a fresh R session, check you registered token with Sys.getenv("GITHUB_PAT")

Related packages

@Pakillo recently made me aware of this similar package dtupdate by Bob Rudis. It has no add-in plus a dependency to dplyr but must be more stable than this one.

Acknowledgements

• this SO answer for fixing the issue with commit sha as reference
• regexplain by @gabenbuie for inspiration in the addin design
• addinslist by @daattali for inspiration in the addin design
• remotes for appropriate testing
• @pvictor for contributing and insightful advices
• @koncina and @Pakillo for testing and suggestions
• @AntoineGuillot2 for his nice tutorial about buttons in DT.

TODO

• smarter search for news
• tests add-in (shinytest)
• is it useful since remotes v2.0.1 allows an interactive upgrade?