data.table devel snapshots as drat repository in gh-pages

[jangorecki]

I would like to have an easier way to install devel version of data.table.
I have no problem with installing at all, but in some cases it would be useful.
I have data.table devel snapshots in my fork of data.table and it works perfectly fine, but when publishing a blog post I would prefer to use devel data.table provided by Rdatatable, not jangorecki.
I need devel cause I want to benchmark some of the features added in devel, like dt[, .SD[val], grp].

Full recipe for creating drat data.table with devel snapshot as source package, starting in data.table git dir, and requires drat package installed to create repo.

git checkout master # ensure you are on master
git status # ensure no uncommitted changes and latest commit should already pass the CI tests
cd ..
R CMD build data.table --no-build-vignettes --no-manual
cd data.table
git checkout --orphan gh-pages
git rm -rf .
rm '.gitignore'
cd ..
Rscript -e 'drat::insertPackage("data.table_1.9.7.tar.gz","data.table")'
cd data.table
git status
git add src
git status
git commit -m 'latest devel snapshot'
git push origin gh-pages

and a way to use it

# installing development snapshot having all deps already
install.packages("data.table", repos = "https://rdatatable.github.io/data.table")

# installing development snapshot and all deps
install.packages("data.table", repos = paste0("https://", c("rdatatable.github.io/data.table", "cran.rstudio.com")))

# another ways
options(repos = c(getOption("repos"), "https://rdatatable.github.io/data.table"))
install.packages("data.table")
# or update all pkgs including data.table
update.packages()

[jangorecki]

Not yet resolved. Build failed to push to gh-pages due to

deploy.sh: line 18: GH_TOKEN: unbound variable

Most likely related to organization account as it was working on user account.
Follow up on issue in dratTravis#2

[MichaelChirico]

@jangorecki very cool, thanks. Should we update the how to install yet?

[jangorecki]

@MichaelChirico soon, I want to make better README.md in gh-pages branch. Any feedback on current setup welcome.

[jangorecki]

@MichaelChirico already done.

Just for the record if anyone would like to reproduce travis+drat on own (non-Rdatatable) account, the following needs to be adjusted:

• .travis.yml
  • generate own GH token, encrypt according to drat + travis vignette, put to secure env
  • change account name in test $TRAVIS_REPO_SLUG == "Rdatatable/data.table"
  • remove test $TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST == "false" to try also on PR
  • adjust test $TRAVIS_BRANCH == "master" as you probably don't want to change your master to keep sync with upstream master
• deploy.sh
  • change account name in git remote add upstream "https://$GH_TOKEN@github.com/Rdatatable/data.table.git"

[MichaelChirico]

@jangorecki just came across an issue potentially related to this.

Trying to use data.table in a Shiny app, but I'm getting the error referenced here:

https://github.com/rstudio/shinyapps/issues/194

IIUC we need to add a "Repository: " line to the DESCRIPTION file to fix this.

PS your name should be on the "Author: " line by now!

[jangorecki]

@MichaelChirico isn't that issue related to shiny/shinyapps/packart? I don't see Repository field mentioned in r-release/R-exts or r-devel/R-exts.