After the partial success with the development environment for R-yaml we tried another R package called data.table as part of the Open Source Development Course. Eventually we managed to run the tests of this too.

This one actually had a lot of details in the README, but some parts were still missing, or at least were assumed to be obvious, which was not the case for us.

Clone the repo

git clone git@github.com:Rdatatable/data.table.git
cd data.table

Start Docker container

docker run -it --name data-table --workdir /opt -v$(pwd):/opt r-base:4.2.3 bash

Install external dependencies we'll need

apt-get update
apt-get install -y pandoc curl libcurl4-gnutls-dev texlive-latex-base texlive-fonts-extra texlive-latex-recommended texlive-fonts-recommended

Install R packages

Rscript -e 'install.packages(c("knitr", "rmarkdown", "pandoc", "curl", "bit64", "bit", "xts", "nanotime", "zoo", "R.utils", "markdown"))'

Run the build

R CMD build .

Run check on the generated file

In the README they mention data.table_1.11.5.tar.gz, but probably due to a change in the version number, now we have data.table_1.14.9.tar.gz

We can run this

R CMD check data.table_1.14.9.tar.gz

But if the README is updated with this then it will be out of date soon. Instead there could be an explanation that one needs to look at the generated file.
Alternatively this command would pick up the current file, assuming there is only one of them.

R CMD check $(ls -1 data.table_*)

Exit the Docker container

exit

Restart the Docker container

docker container start -i data-table

Remove Docker container

docker rm data-table