Testthat: test_path() works from exactly two places

[jennybc]

test_path() works when wd is either top-level directory or tests/testhat. And that's it.

I was trying to use it from a vignette because a token file I need is in tests/testthat. I already have testthat in Suggests (but not devtools), so thought I'd build a path with testthat::test_path() instead of devtools::package_file(), but:

getwd()
#> [1] "/Users/jenny/rrr/googlesheets/vignettes"
testthat::test_path("googlesheets_token.rds")
#> Error: Can't find `tests/testthat/` in current directory.

Same error with devtools::document().

I know this is not what testthat::test_path() was designed for. I'm just trying to figure how to specify a path that [1] doesn't require manually changing wd during interactive development, [2] works when the vignette gets rendered with other machinery, and [3] doesn't add another dependency, e.g. devtools.

[hadley]

If it needs to be used with vignettes and tests, I'd wonder about putting the token somewhere else. I wonder we need some conventions around putting it in inst/?

[jennybc]

You could be right.I did note that tests is a good location because even if you screw up and include in package bundle, it won't make it into the binary package? But this is neither here nor there w/r/t my attempt to get creative with test_path().

[kevinushey]

Why not have an implementation like e.g.

test_path <- function(filename) {
    file.path(find_pkg_root(), "tests/testthat", filename)
}

Where find_pkg_root() just crawls directories upwards until it finds a directory with an appropriate DESCRIPTION file?

(I feel like @krlmlr was just working on something related to this...)

[krlmlr]

Yeah, just need to cran the rprojroot package...

[jennybc]

Yes there's rprojroot 👍 and this is also exactly what devtools::package_file() does. I was just hoping to freeload on the fact that testthat is already in Suggests. This wd stuff has become my second cause, second only to promoting rendered markdown on GitHub.

[krlmlr]

Side note: If you want to be totally sure not to release the token, put it somewhere under .git. Or use Hadley's secure package (alas, not on CRAN yet)?

[jennybc]

@krlmlr You've got rprojroot on CRAN now and it's very lightweight. Maybe you have a nice solution for this now? Twitter just reminded me of this.

[krlmlr]

You can use

rprojroot::is_r_package$find_file("tests/testthat", "a")

but you have to specify the "tests/testthat" prefix. It might be possible to enhance make_fix_file() to support a subdir argument, so that you could run

test_file <- rprojroot::is_r_package$make_fix_file(subdir = "tests/testthat")

and then test_file() just works. PR welcome ;-)

Files won't be found when tests are run from R CMD check, it uses a different directory structure.

[jennybc]

@krlmlr I now know exactly what you meant by this 😔:

Files won't be found when tests are run from R CMD check, it uses a different directory structure.

In a helper file I have

here <- rprojroot::find_package_root_file

TEST_DIR <- here("tests", "testthat")

and I use TEST_DIR and here() elsewhere in the tests. All is well until I run R CMD check, at which point I get this error:

  > test_check("testtest")
  Error: No root directory found. Test criterion:
  Contains a file 'DESCRIPTION' with contents matching '^Package: '

So is there a criterion that will work when you're working in your source package, when you run devtools::test(), AND during R CMD check? I'm 2 for 3 right now.

[krlmlr]

Should be done in rprojroot.

[ErikSchutte]

I can't really find much about this, and this is one of the few places that mentions rprojroot, so I'm giving this a shot..

When I try to use root <- rprojroot::find_package_root_file from within a test file to jump to the root and then select my test data in /data/, R CMD CHECK hands me a Error in library(rprojroot) : there is no package called 'rprojroot'.

I have absolutely no clue why, since I can do this when I run the tests separately with devtools::test()

Here's a link to my git

Any suggestions?

[krlmlr]

Have you installed the rprojroot package? You should also add it to the "Suggests" of your package.

[ErikSchutte]

Thanks for the quick reply on such an old issue. I did not know about adding it to the "Suggests" in DESCRIPTION. That did the trick, thanks!

On a side note, could you explain how R CMD CHECK interprets this? Since I can't explain how it magically appends .Rcheck/test/testthat to the root of the package.

Error: No root directory found in /Users/someone/git/leqtar.Rcheck/tests/testthat or its parent directories. Root criterion: contains a file DESCRIPTION with contents matching ^Package:

(I googled for this .Rcheck directory, which should stay if I turn off clean up after RMD check, but I don't have this. Can that be the case?)

[krlmlr]

Please review the section "testthat files" section in the vignette.

[jennybc]

@ErikSchutte I use rprojroot to make a large set of spreadsheets available to the tests in readxl. Maybe that is a helpful example of real world use:

https://github.com/tidyverse/readxl/blob/master/tests/testthat/helper.R

[ErikSchutte]

Thanks @krlmlr & @jennybc for the help. I figured it out.