Home/ Questions/Q 8528831
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-11T08:53:27+00:00

I am using the testthat package to test an R package that is within

  • 0

I am using the testthat package to test an R package that is within a larger repository. I would like to test the contents of a file outside of the R package.

Can I reference a file that is located outside of an R package while testing?

What I have tried

A reproducible example can be downloaded as MyRepo.tar.gz

My repository is called “myRepo”, and it includes an R package, “myRpkg” and a folder full of miscellaneous scripts

~/MyRepo/
~/MyRepo/MyRpkg
~/MyRepo/Scripts

The tests in “MyRpkg” are in the /tests/ folder

~/myRepo/myRpkg/tests/test.myscript.R

And I want to be able to test a file in the Scripts folder:

~/MyRepo/Scripts/myscript.sh

I would like to read the script to test the contents of the first line doing something like this:

  check.script <- readLines("../../../Scripts/myscript.sh")[1]
  expect_true(grepl("echo", check.script))

This works fine if I start from the MyRepo directory:

cd ~/MyRepo
R CMD check MyRpkg

But if I move to another directory, it fails:

cd
R CMD check MyRepo/MyRpkg
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As it says in R-exts

    The directory tests is copied to the check area, and the tests are run with the copy as the working directory and with R_LIBS set to ensure that the copy of the package installed during testing will be found by library(pkg_name).

    By default, the check directory is created in the current directory. Thus when running R CMD check from ~/MyRepo, the tests directory is copied to ~/MyRepo/MyRpkg.Rcheck/tests and hence

    check.script <- readLines("../../../Scripts/myscript.sh")[1]

    is interpreted as

    check.script <- readLines("~/MyRepo/Scripts/myscript.sh")[1]

    as required. However starting from ~/ would imply

    check.script <- readLines("~/Scripts/myscript.sh")[1]

    which isn’t what you want. A work-around is to specify the directory in which the check directory is created, i.e.

    R CMD check -o MyRepo MyRepo/MyRpkg

    so that the copied tests directory has the same “grandparent” as the original tests directory.

    Still, I wonder why the file must be external to the package. If you want to use the file in the package tests, it would make sense to include the file in the package. You could create an inst directory and put the Scripts directory in there, so that the Scripts directory will be copied to the package directory on installation and then

    check.script <- readLines("../foo/Scripts/myscript.sh")[1]

    could be used inside the test script, since the package is installed in MyRpkg.Rcheck/foo during R CMD check. Alternatively you could create an exec directory and put the script file in there, then

    check.script <- readLines("../foo/exec/myscript.sh")[1]

    would work. As both of these solutions only need to find the package installed during testing it wouldn’t matter where you ran R CMD check from. See Package subdirectories and Non-R scripts in packages for more info.

    • 0