Use GitHub Package R Actions - r

Question

I was trying to use actions in a package I wrote. The issue is that the package actions uses remotes in its setup to install CRAN only packages.
Since the package I am working on depends on a non CRAN package that is present on GitHub, both coverage and R CMD checks fail. I tried to avoid this by naively downgrading to an earlier version of the package in depends but some functions are not exported. I am wondering if someone knows a workaround that might help(I cannot open an issue at actions since their support.md file discourages this).

Answer 1

If your package depends on a non-CRAN package, you must include under Remotes: rather than just Imports: in your DESCRIPTION file. Here you would have:
Imports:
actions
Remotes:
r-lib/actions
This will pass checks, but there is no work around for publishing to CRAN if any of your dependencies are not on CRAN, thus you'll get a warning if any packages are present in the Remotes field.
The alternative using Travis is adding r_github_packages: r-lib/actions to your .travis.yml.

Answer 2

After some time, I have found a workaround that for now is good enough if you want to test for the development version(like I wanted). You should include an install_github command in the check.yaml file. Here's an example:
- name: Install dependencies
run: |
install.packages(c("remotes","testthat"),dependencies=TRUE)
remotes::install_github("tidyverse/dplyr")
remotes::install_cran("covr")
shell: Rscript {0}
The above snippet fixed my issue because I wanted to depend on a future dplyr version. You can view the full yaml file here.