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

First, take special note of the proviso in ?executing_linters about the need to have your package and its dependencies installed or loaded (e.g. with pkgload::load_all()) in order for certain linters (e.g. object_usage_linter()) to function as intended.

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.

Alternatively you can use the eponymous lint-changed-files.yaml to only lint any changed files:

usethis::use_github_action("lint-changed-files")

Comments to the commit or pull request will be printed as annotations along side the status check on GitHub. 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. This is set by default for both r-lib/actions’s lint.yaml and lint-changed-files.yaml. 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.

For projects

You are not limited to 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.