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checklist

The goal of this package is to provide a variety of tools for checking RStudio project based assignments. These tools are not specifically about testing for the correctness of an assignment, but rather about testing the process and reproducibility of that assignment. For example:

  • does the project compile (knit)
  • does the project only include the files want
  • does the include Rmd document have the correct structure
  • and many more

Installation

You can install the the development version of this package from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("rundel/checklist")

Example

Lets look at a simple example of the type of assignment a student might turnin, all of the files are available in inst/examples/hw1 within this repository, if you have already installed the package then we can also find the directory using system.file("examples/hw1", package="checklist").

dir = system.file("examples/hw1", package="checklist")

# Show the project contents
fs::dir_tree(dir)
#> /Users/rundel/Library/R/arm64/4.3/library/checklist/examples/hw1
#> ├── README.md
#> ├── fizzbuzz.png
#> ├── hw1.Rmd
#> └── hw1.Rproj

We can now use checklist to express simple checks for the files in this directory. For example if we wanted to make sure that the students submit a knitted version of their homework we could use the following check:

check_required_files("hw1.md", dir)
#> The following required files are missing:
#> ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#> ✖ hw1.md

Alternatively, we may want to prevent the students from turning in a knitted version (to check the reproducibility of their work) and this can be done explicity with

check_disallowed_files("hw1.md", dir)

Alternatively we may instead want to explicity about what files are allowed (ensuring students have not added or renamed anything), then we can

check_allowed_files(c("README.md", "fizzbuzz.png", "hw1.Rmd", "hw1.Rproj"), dir)

By default the package ignores hidden files (files whose name starts with a .) but we can also check for these as well using the all = TRUE argument.

check_allowed_files(c("README.md", "fizzbuzz.png", "hw1.Rmd", "hw1.Rproj"), dir, all = TRUE)
#> Disallowed files found: (please remove the following files)
#> ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#> ✖ .hidden

To refine this, we may want to allow .gitignore as well as the .Rproj.user/ folder. These can be added to the files argument and we can even use standard glob wildcards to make our life easier,

check_allowed_files(
  c("README.md", "fizzbuzz.png", "hw1.Rmd", "hw1.Rproj", ".gitignore", ".Rproj.user/*"), 
  dir, all = TRUE
)
#> Disallowed files found: (please remove the following files)
#> ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#> ✖ .hidden