A GitHub action to validate CITATION.cff files with R.

If you have a Citation File Format (cff) on your repository this action would check its validity against the defined schema.

A full valid workflow:

on:
  push:
    paths:
      - CITATION.cff
  workflow_dispatch:

name: CITATION.cff
jobs:
  Validate-CITATION-cff:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Validate CITATION.cff
    env:
      GITHUB_PAT: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Validate CITATION.cff
        uses: dieghernan/cff-validator@v3

On error, the action produces a Job Summary with a high-level description of the errors found:

For more examples, see the actions provided on this path.

You can easily create a badge showing the current status of validation of your CITATION.cff like this:

See a quick demo:

• citation-path: Path to .cff file to be validated. By default it selects a CITATION.cff file on the root of the repository:

  - name: Validate CITATION.cff
    uses: dieghernan/cff-validator@v3
    with:
      citation-path: "examples/CITATION.cff"

• cache-version: default 1. If you need to invalidate the existing cache pass any other number and a new cache will be used.

• install-r: default false. If true download and install R during the setup. If false use the existing installation in the GitHub Action image.

See a full featured implementation on this example.

This action runs on R. For the same functionality you can use the cffr package:

cffr::cff_validate("CITATION.cff")
#> 
#> cff_validate results——
#> Congratulations! This .cff file is valid

See cffr::cff_validate() for details.

Druskat, S., Spaaks, J. H., Chue Hong, N., Haines, R., Baker, J., Bliven, S., Willighagen, E., Pérez-Suárez, D., & Konovalov, A. (2021). Citation File Format (Version 1.2.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5171937