With gitlabr::use_gitlab_ci() you can create a .gitlab-ci.yml file in the root of your project. This file is used by GitLab CI/CD to manage your pipelines.

In ‘gitlabr’, there are different types of templates available.

# Templates available
list.files(system.file("gitlab-ci", package = "gitlabr"))
#> [1] "bookdown-production.yml"         "bookdown.yml"                   
#> [3] "check-coverage-pkgdown-renv.yml" "check-coverage-pkgdown.yml"

Types available are:

  • "check-coverage-pkgdown": Check package along with Code coverage with ‘covr’ and ‘pkgdown’ site on GitLab Pages
  • "check-coverage-pkgdown-renv": Check package built in a fixed ‘renv’ state along with Code coverage with ‘covr’ and ‘pkgdown’ site on GitLab Pages.
  • "bookdown": Build ‘bookdown’ HTML and PDF site on GitLab Pages
  • "bookdown-production": Build ‘bookdown’ HTML and PDF site on GitLab Pages. Where there will be a version of the book for each branch deployed. See https://github.com/statnmap/GitLab-Pages-Deploy for setup details.

Hence, if you develop a R package, you can use the "check-coverage-pkgdown" template to check your package and deploy the documentation on GitLab Pages. Default image used is image = "rocker/verse:latest".
You can change parameters of use_gitlab_ci() but there shouldn’t be reasons to change the “.gitlab-ci.yml” file.

# Create a .gitlab-ci.yml file with the template
gitlabr::use_gitlab_ci(template = "check-coverage-pkgdown")

If you wrote a bookdown book, you can use the "bookdown" template to build the HTML and PDF site on GitLab Pages. The CI will detect packages used in the book and install them.

In the “.gitlab-ci.yml” file, you can choose the output of your book. By default, the “bookdown::bs4_book”, “bookdown::gitbook” (commented), “bookdown::pdf_book” and “pagedown::html_paged” outputs are created. You can comment the outputs you don’t want to build.

# Create a .gitlab-ci.yml file with the template
gitlabr::use_gitlab_ci(template = "bookdown")