making awesome automations with Github Actions

Run scripts… 🙋‍♀️️

every day?

every week?

every month?

What is GitHub Actions?

How can we run R Scripts with it?

R packages 📦

# Load usethis
library(usethis)
# run check
use_github_action("check-standard")
# build pkgdown site
use_github_action("pkgdown")

See other examples in: github.com/r-lib/actions/

This image is a line plot made with ggplot2, it shows GitHub Actions runs by RStudio's organization on GitHub. In the X axis, we have month/year and in the Y axis we have the total GitHub Actions runs per month. We can see that the Actions runs increased from 4k per month in May/2020 to around 18k per month in May/2022.

Completed action runs
Public repositories from:
- rstudio
- tidyverse
- r-lib
- mlverse
- tidymodels
- quarto-dev

What else can we do?

Run arbitrary R scripts

Scrape data from the internet
Run reports with RMarkdown or Quarto
Send emails
Save results

on: # what triggers the workflow?
  workflow_dispatch: # start when pressing a button
  schedule: 
  - cron: "0 0 * * *" # run everyday

name: execute-r-script # name of the workflow

jobs: # what the workflow should do?
  execute-r-script:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest # Run on Ubuntu
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v2 # Install R
        with: 
          use-public-rspm: true    
      - name: run-script
        run: Rscript my_awesome_R_script.R  # Run R script

on: # what triggers the workflow?
  workflow_dispatch: # start when pressing a button
  schedule: 
  - cron: "0 0 * * *" # run everyday

name: execute-r-script # name of the workflow

jobs: # what the workflow should do?
  execute-r-script:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest # Run on Ubuntu
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v2 # Install R
        with: 
          use-public-rspm: true    
      - name: run-script
        run: Rscript my_awesome_R_script.R  # Run R script

on: # what triggers the workflow?
  workflow_dispatch: # start when pressing a button
  schedule: 
  - cron: "0 0 * * *" # run everyday

name: execute-r-script # name of the workflow

jobs: # what the workflow should do?
  execute-r-script:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest # Run on Ubuntu
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v2 # Install R
        with: 
          use-public-rspm: true    
      - name: run-script
        run: Rscript my_awesome_R_script.R  # Run R script

More examples…

https://beamilz.com/series-gha.html

Thanks!

RStudio - Thanks for the Diversity Scholarship!
R-Ladies São Paulo and R-Ladies Global
Curso-R and Julio Trecenti, Daniel Falbel, Athos Damiani
Creators and contributors of r-lib/actions
Articulation Inc.

Beatriz Milz 🇧🇷

Contact
- Twitter: @BeaMilz
- Blog: beamilz.com
About Bea
- R-Ladies São Paulo Co-organizer
- Teacher at Curso-R
- Tidyverse instructor certified by RStudio