BiocCheck
SummaryBiocCheck
encapsulates Bioconductor package
guidelines and best practices, analyzing packages and reporting three
categories of issues:
BiocCheck
will continue past an
ERROR
, thus it is possible to have more than one, but it
will exit with an error code if run from the OS command line.)BiocCheck
BiocCheck
is meant to run within R on a directory
containing an R package, or a source tarball (.tar.gz
file):
BiocCheck
takes options which can be seen with
?BioCheck
.
Note that the --new-package
option is turned on in the
Single Package Builder (SPB) during the new package submission
process.
BiocCheck
be runBiocCheck
should always be run after
R CMD check
.
Note that BiocCheck
is not a replacement for
R CMD check
; it is complementary. It should be run after
R CMD check
completes successfully.
BiocCheck
can also be run via GitHub Actions, a
continuous integration system on GitHub. This service allows automatic
testing of R packages in a controlled build environment.
See the biocthis package for more details.
BiocCheck
BiocCheck
should be installed as follows:
BiocCheck
outputActual BiocCheck
output is shown below in
bold.
Checking for deprecated package usage…
Can be disabled with --no-check-deprecated
.
At present, this looks to see whether your package has a dependency
on the multicore
package (ERROR
).
Our recommendation is to use BiocParallel. Note that ‘fork’ clusters do not provide any gain from parallelizing code on Windows. Socket clusters work on all operating systems.
Also checks Deprecated
Packages currently specified in
release and devel versions of Bioconductor (ERROR
).
Checking for remote package usage…
Can be disabled with --no-check-remotes
Bioconductor only allows dependencies that are hosted on CRAN or
Bioconductor. The use of Remotes:
in the DESCRIPTION to
specify a unique remote location is not allowed.
Checking for ‘LazyData: true’ usage…
For packages that include data, we recommend not including
LazyData: TRUE
. This rarely proves to be a good thing. In
our experience it only slows down the loading of packages with large
data (NOTE
).
Can be disabled with --no-check-version-num
and
--no-check-R-ver
.
Checking version number…
Version:
field
in your DESCRIPTION
file. If it doesn’t, it usually means
you did not build the tarball with R CMD build
.
(ERROR
)99
‘y’ version in the x.y.z
versioning
scheme (ERROR
). Package versions starting with a non-zero
value will get flagged with a warning. Typical new package submissions
start with a zero ‘x’ version (e.g., 0.99.*
;
WARNING
). This is only done if the
--new-package
option is supplied. An ‘x’ nonzero will only
be accepted if the package was pre-released or published under such a
case.ERROR
).Depends:
field of your
DESCRIPTION
file, BiocCheck
checks to make
sure that the R version specified matches the version currently used in
Bioconductor. This helps to prevent mixing of Bioconductor
release and devel versions (esp. when R versions differ) which is a
frequent source of confusion and errors (NOTE
).For more information on package versions, see the Version Numbering HOWTO.
Can be disabled with --no-check-pkg-size
and
--no-check-file-size
.
Checking package size Checks that the package size meets Bioconductor requirements. The current package size limit is 5 MB for Software packages. Experiment Data and Annotation packages are excluded from this check. This check is only run if checking a source tarball. (ERROR)
Checking individual file sizes The current size
limit for all individual files is 5 MB. Checks inspect both package-wide
files and data files found in the data
,
inst/extdata
, and data-raw
folders.
(WARNING)
It may be necessary to remove large files from your Git history; see Remove Large Data Files and Clean Git Tree
These can be disabled with the --no-check-bioc-views
option, which might be useful when checking non-Bioconductor
packages (since biocViews is a concept unique to
Bioconductor).
Checking biocViews…
Can be disabled with --no-check-bioc-views
biocViews
field is present in the DESCRIPTION file
(ERROR
).ERROR
).WARNING
).WARNING
).recommendBiocViews()
function from biocViews
to automatically suggest some biocViews for your package.More information about biocViews is available in the Using biocViews HOWTO.
The Bioconductor Build System (BBS) is our nightly build system and it has certain requirements. Packages which don’t meet these requirements can be silently skipped by BBS, so it’s important to make sure that every package meets the requirements.
Can be disabled with --no-check-bbs
Checking build system compatibility…
Checking for blank lines in DESCRIPTION… Checks
to make sure there are no blank lines in the DESCRIPTION file
(ERROR
).
Checking if DESCRIPTION is well formatted…
Checks if the DESCRIPTION can be parsed with read.dcf
(ERROR
)
Checking Description: field length… Checks that the Description field in the DESCRIPTION file has a minimum
WARNING
if less than 50)WARNING
if less than 20)NOTE
if less than 3)Checking for whitespace in DESCRIPTION field
names… Checks to make sure there is no whitespace in
DESCRIPTION file field names (ERROR
).
Checking that Package field matches dir/tarball
name… Checks to make sure that Package
field of
DESCRIPTION file matches directory or tarball name
(ERROR
).
Checking for Version field… Checks to make sure
a Version
field is present in the DESCRIPTION file
(ERROR
).
Checking for valid maintainer… Checks to make
sure the DESCRIPTION file has a valid Authors@R
field which
resolves to a valid Maintainer
(ERROR
).
A valid Authors@R
field consists of:
person
.cre
(creator) role.family
or
given
name defined.NOTE
if not.Suggests that the maintainer provide an ORCID iD in the Authors@R
field as an argument in the person function, e.g.,
comment = c(ORCID = ...)
(NOTE
).
License:
in the DESCRIPTION
file does not restrict use, e.g., to academic-use only
(ERROR
). Licenses are compared to R’s internal database
provided at $R_HOME/share/licenses/license.db and read with
read.dcf
. Licenses not listed in the database or with
spelling deviations e.g., GPL-3.0
vs GPL-3
are
flagged with a NOTE
. A NOTE
is also generated
if the license is not a valid SPDX license identifier (with the
exception of those already in the database file) or if the license
cannot be verified in the database. A NOTE
is also
generated if the License:
field is malformed, or the
database cannot be located. We also recommend developers to browse to
the choosealicense to
find a suitable license for their package as well as the SPDX License List website.==
in the DESCRIPTION
file
(ERROR
).DESCRIPTION
file to see whether
recommended fields i.e., ‘URL’, ‘Date’ and ‘BugReports’ are populated
(NOTE
). Date
field is checked for the format
YYYY-MM-DD
.Depends:
and Imports:
fields;
if none (WARNING
)..Rbuildignore
file
(ERROR
).<package_name>.BiocCheck
folder
byproduct when running BiocCheck(".")
locally does not get
included in the package directory (ERROR
).R CMD build
; therefore, inst/doc
folder is not
needed (ERROR
).Can be disabled with --no-check-vignettes
.
Checking vignette directory…
vignettes
directory exists
(ERROR
).vignettes
directory only contains
vignette sources (.Rmd, .Rnw, .Rrst, .Rhtml, *.Rtex)
(ERROR
)..Rnw
vignettes, if any found, suggest
RMarkdown (.Rmd
) vignettes instead
(WARNING
)ERROR
).WARNING
)ERROR
)WARNING
)eval=FALSE
chunks is more
than 50% of the total (WARNING
).eval=FALSE
. The majority of vignette code is expected to be
evaluated (WARNING
)BiocInstaller
code
(WARNING
)sessionInfo()
or
session_info()
for reproducibility
(NOTE
).ERROR
).ERROR
).Checking whether vignette is built with ‘R CMD build’…
Only run when --build-output-file
is specified.
Analyzes the output of R CMD build
to see if vignettes
are built. It simply looks for a line that starts:
* creating vignettes ...
If this line is not present, it means R
has not detected
that a vignette needs to be built (ERROR
).
If you have vignette sources yet still get this message, there could be several causes:
VignetteBuilder
line in the
DESCRIPTION
file.VignetteEngine
line in the vignette
source.See knitr
’s package vignette page,
or the Non-Sweave
vignettes section of “Writing R Extensions” for more
information.
Can be disabled with --no-check-library-calls
and
--no-check-install-self
.
NOTE
) Check
for use of functions that install or update packages. This list
currently includes the use of install
,
install.packages
, update.packages
or
biocLite
.ERROR
) It is not necessary to call
library()
or require()
on your own package
within code in the R directory or in man page examples. In these
contexts, your package is already loaded.Can be disabled with --no-check-coding-practices
.
Checking coding practices…
Checks to see whether certain programming practices are found in the R directory.
We recommend that vapply()
be used instead of
sapply()
. Problems arise when the X
argument
to sapply()
has length 0; the return type is then a
list()
rather than a vector or array.
(NOTE
)
We recommend that seq_len()
or
seq_along()
be used instead of 1:...
. This is
because the case 1:0
creates the sequence
c(1, 0)
which may be an unexpected or unwanted result
(NOTE
).
Single colon typos are checked for when a user inputs
‘package:function’ instead of using double colons (‘::’) to import a
function (ERROR
).
Users should not download data from external hosting platforms.
This means avoiding references to major platforms such as GitHub,
GitLab, and BitBucket. For the same reason we do not import GitHub
packages, external data can be unstable and not well maintained.
Maintainers should re-use data already available in Bioconductor or
contribute an ExperimentHub
, AnnotationHub
or
similar package (ERROR
).
A package should not download files at the time of loading or
attaching i.e., using library
. Using
download.file
and download
should be avoided
and when found, an ERROR
will be emitted.
paste
and paste0
function calls within
signaling functions such as message
, warning
,
and stop
are redundant and should be avoided
(NOTE
). paste
calls with the
collapse
argument are ignored.
When notifying users, message
should be used. When
cat
and print
are used, users will get a note
saying that these should only be used in show methods for classes
(NOTE
).
message
, warn*
, and error
keywords should not be included in signal condition functions:
message
, warning
, and stop
. This
is redundant and should be avoided (NOTE
).
It is favorable to use the assignment arrow (‘<-’) over the
equals assignment (‘=’) for clarity in the code and legibility. Any use
of the =
will be flagged with a NOTE
.
New submissions should not use any .Deprecated
,
.Defunct
, lifeCycle
,
deprecate_warn
, or deprecate_stop
function
calls (WARNING
). Existing packages should evolve these
functions after a Bioconductor release according to the package
guidelines.
Checking for T… Checking for F…
It is bad practice to use T
and F
for
TRUE
and FALSE
. This is because T
and F
are ordinary variables whose value can be altered,
leading to unexpected results, whereas the value of TRUE
and FALSE
cannot be changed
(WARNING
).
Avoid class membership checks with class()
/
is()
and ==
/ !=
. Developers
should use is(x, 'class')
for S4 classes.
(WARNING
)
Use system2()
over system()
. ‘system2’
is a more portable and flexible interface than
‘system’.(NOTE
)
Use of set.seed()
in R code. The
set.seed
should not be set in R functions directly. The
user should always have the option for the set.seed and know when it is
being invoked. (WARNING
)
Checking parsed R code in R directory, examples, vignettes…
BiocCheck
parses the code in your package’s R directory,
and in evaluated man page and vignette examples to look for various
symbols, which result in issues of varying severity.
BiocCheck
checks for direct slot access (via @
or slot()
) to S4 objects in vignette and example code. This
code should always use accessors to interact with S4
classes. Since you may be using S4 classes (which don’t provide
accessors) from another package, the severity is only NOTE
.
But if the S4 object is defined in your package, it’s
mandatory to write accessors for it and to use them
(instead of direct slot access) in all vignette and example code
(NOTE
).browser()
causes the command-line R debugger to be invoked, and should not be used
in production code (though it’s OK to wrap such calls in a conditional
that evaluates to TRUE if some debugging option is set)
(WARNING
).install()
calls is bad practice. A separation between
analysis and configuration tasks keeps code modular and reproducible
(ERROR
).<<-
is bad practice. It can over-write user-defined
symbols, and introduces non-linear paths of evaluation that are
difficult to debug (NOTE
).Sys.setenv
function (ERROR
).suppressWarnings
and
suppressMessages
is problematic as it usually indicates a
larger underlying issue with the fragility of the package codebase
(NOTE
).Can be disabled with --no-check-function-len
.
Checking function lengths…
BiocCheck
prints an informative message about the length
(in lines) of your five longest functions (this includes functions in
your R directory and in evaluated man page and vignette examples).
If there are functions longer than 50 lines, BiocCheck
outputs (NOTE
). You may want to consider breaking up long
functions into smaller ones. This is a basic refactoring technique that
results in code that’s easier to read, debug, test, reuse, and
maintain.
Can be disabled with --no-check-man-doc
.
Checking man page documentation…
It can be handy to generate man page skeletons with
prompt()
and/or RStudio. These skeletons contain comments
that look like this:
%% ~~ A concise (1-5 lines) description of the dataset. ~~
BiocCheck
asks you to remove such comments
(NOTE
).
Every man page must have a non-empty \value
section.
(WARNING
)
man page examples examples
Checking exported objects have runnable examples…
BiocCheck
looks at all man pages which document exported
objects and lists the ones that don’t contain runnable examples (either
because there is no examples
section or because its
examples are tagged with dontrun
or donttest
).
Runnable examples are a key part of literate programming and help ensure
that your code does what you say it does.
ERROR
).BiocCheck
lists the
missing ones and asks you to add runnable examples to them
(NOTE
).dontrun
or donttest
.
Use of these functions is not recommended and shoud be justified
(NOTE
). If exception is made the recommended usage is to
use donttest over dontrun (NOTE
) as donttest requires valid
R code.Can be disabled with --no-check-news
.
Checking package NEWS…
BiocCheck
looks to see if there is a valid NEWS file
either in the ‘inst’ directory or in the top-level directory of your
package, and checks whether it is properly formatted
(NOTE
).
The location and format of the NEWS file must be consistent with
?news
. Meaning the file can be one of the following four
options:
inst/NEWS.Rd
./NEWS.md
./NEWS
inst/NEWS
NEWS files are a good way to keep users up-to-date on changes to your
package. Excerpts from properly formatted NEWS files will be included in
Bioconductor release announcements to tell users what has
changed in your package in the last release. In order for this to
happen, your NEWS file must be formatted in a specific way; you may want
to consider using an inst/NEWS.Rd
file instead as the
format is more well-defined. Malformatted NEWS file outputs
WARNING
.
More information on NEWS files is available in the help topic
?news
.
Can be disabled with --no-check-unit-tests
.
Checking unit tests…
We strongly recommend unit tests, though we do not at present require them. For more on what unit tests are, why they are helpful, and how to implement them, read our Unit Testing HOWTO.
At present we just check to see whether unit tests are present, and
if not, urge you to add them (NOTE
).
Checking skip_on_bioc() in tests…
Can be disabled with --no-check-skip-bioc-tests
.
Finds flag for skipping tests in the bioconductor environment
(NOTE
)
Can be disabled with --no-check-formatting
.
Checking formatting of DESCRIPTION, NAMESPACE, man pages, R source, and vignette source…
There is no 100% correct way to format code. These checks adhere to
the Bioconductor
Style Guide (NOTE
).
We think it’s important to avoid very long lines in code. Note that some text editors do not wrap text automatically, requiring horizontal scrolling in order to read it. Also note that R syntax is very flexible and whitespace can be inserted almost anywhere in an expression, making it easy to break up long lines.
These checks are run against not just R code, but the DESCRIPTION and NAMESPACE files as well as man pages and vignette source files. All of these files allow long lines to be broken up.
The output of this check includes the first 6 offending lines of
code; see more with
BiocCheck:::checkFormatting("path/to/YourPackage", nlines=Inf)
.
There are several helpful packages that can be used for formatting of
R code to particular coding standards such as formatR and styler as well as
the “Reformat code” button in RStudio
Desktop. Each solution has its advantages, though styler works with
roxygen2
examples and is actively maintained. You can
re-format your code using styler as shown
below:
## Install styler if necessary
if (!requireNamespace("styler", quietly = TRUE)) {
install.packages("styler")
}
## Automatically re-format the R code in your package
styler::style_pkg(transformers = styler::tidyverse_style(indent_by = 4))
If you are working with RStudio
Desktop use also the “Reformat code” button which will help you
break long lines of code. Alternatively, use formatR, though
beware that it can break valid R code involving both types of quotation
marks ("
and '
) and does not support
re-formatting roxygen2
examples. In general, it is best to
version control your code before applying any automatic re-formatting
solutions and implement unit tests to verify that your code runs as
intended after you re-format your code.
Checking if package already exists in CRAN… This
can be disabled with the --no-check-CRAN
option. A package
with the same name (case differences are ignored) cannot exist on CRAN.
Packages submitted to Bioconductor must be removed from CRAN before the
next Bioconductor release (WARNING
).
Checking if new package already exists in
Bioconductor… Only run if the
--new-package
flag is turned on. A package with the same
name (case differences are ignored) cannot exist in
Bioconductor (ERROR
).
Checking for bioc-devel mailing list subscription…
This only applies if BiocCheck
is run on the
Bioconductor build machines, because this step requires special
authorization. This can be disabled with the
--no-check-bioc-help
option.
Checking for support site registration…
Check that the package maintainer is register at our support site using the same
email address that is in the Maintainer
field of their
package DESCRIPTION
file (ERROR
). This can be
disabled with the --no-check-bioc-help
option.
The main place people ask questions about Bioconductor packages is the support site. Please register and then include your package name in the list of watched tags. When a question is asked and tagged with your package name, you’ll get an email.
Package name is in support site watched tags is now a requirement.
BiocCheckGitClone
BiocCheckGitClone
provides a few additional
Bioconductor package checks that can only should be run on a
open source directory (raw Git clone) NOT a tarball. Reporting similarly
in three categories as discussed above:
ERROR.
WARNING.
NOTE.
BiocCheckGitClone
BiocCheckGitClone
is meant to run within R on a
directory containing an R package:
BiocCheckGitClone
Please see previous Installing BiocCheck
section.
BiocCheckGitClone
outputActual BiocCheckGitClone
output is shown below in
bold.
Checking valid files
There are a number of files that should not be Git tracked. This
check notifies if any of these files are present
(ERROR
)
The current list of files checked are given by this internal constant:
## [1] ".renviron" ".rprofile" ".rproj" ".rproj.user"
## [5] ".rhistory" ".rapp.history" ".o" ".sl"
## [9] ".so" ".dylib" ".a" ".dll"
## [13] ".def" ".ds_store" "unsrturl.bst" ".log"
## [17] ".aux" ".backups" ".cproject" ".directory"
## [21] ".dropbox" ".exrc" ".gdb.history" ".gitattributes"
## [25] ".gitmodules" ".hgtags" ".project" ".seed"
## [29] ".settings" ".tm_properties" ".rdata"
These files may be included in your personal directories but should
be added to a .gitignore
file so they are not Git
tracked.
Checking DESCRIPTION
Default R CMD build behavior will format the DESCRIPTION file; After this occurs, it is hard to determine certain aspects of the original DESCRIPTION file. An example would be how the Authors and Maintainers are specified. The DESCRIPTION file is therefore checked in its raw original form.
Checking if DESCRIPTION is well formatted The
DESCRIPTION file must be properly formatted and able to be read in with
read.dcf()
in order to function properly on the
Bioconductor build machines. This check attempts to
read.dcf("DESCRIPTION")
and throws an ERROR if
mal-formatted. (ERROR
)
Checking for valid maintainer While in the past
using the Author and Maintainer fields were acceptable, R has moved
towards using the Authors@R
standard for listing package
contributors. This checks that Authors@R is utilized and that there are no instances
of Author or Maintainer in the DESCRIPTION (ERROR
)
Checking that CITATION file is correctly formatted
BiocCheck
tries to read the provided
CITATION
file (i.e. not the one automatically generated by
each package) with readCitationFile()
- this is expected to
be in the INST
folder (NOTE
).
readCitationFile()
needs to work properly without the
package being installed. Most common causes of failure occur when trying
to use helper functions like packageVersion()
or
packageDate()
instead of using meta$Version
or
meta$Date
. See R
documentation for more information.
Here is an example of a formatted CITATION
file. See the
GenomicRanges
package CITATION
file for
details.
## Warning in file(con, "r"): file("") only supports open = "w+" and open = "w+b":
## using the former
## <0-length citation>
CITATION
files are expected to contain a
doi
input within the bibentry()
function call.
When a doi
input is not present, a WARNING
is
emitted as most modern publications should have an assigned DOI.
Note that citEntry()
should be updated to
bibentry()
as seen with
R CMD check --as-cran
.
Bioconductor packages are not required to have a
CITATION
file but it is useful both for users and for
tracking Bioconductor project-wide metrics. Maintainers should update
the CITATION
file once a preprint or publication is
released. Packages that do not have a CITATION
file are
flagged with a NOTE
.
BiocCheck
We make an effort to reduce package reviewer burden and to increase
the quality of Bioconductor submissions via automated checks; therefore,
BiocCheck
is a continually evolving package. Contributions
are certainly most welcome. Consider opening a pull request on GitHub
with unit tests and updates to both the NEWS
file and
vignette. Thank you for being part of the community!
## R version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
## Running under: Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
##
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3
## LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.26.so; LAPACK version 3.12.0
##
## locale:
## [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
## [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=C
## [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
## [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
## [9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
##
## time zone: Etc/UTC
## tzcode source: system (glibc)
##
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
##
## other attached packages:
## [1] BiocCheck_1.43.2 BiocStyle_2.35.0
##
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
## [1] rappdirs_0.3.3 sass_0.4.9 utf8_1.2.4
## [4] generics_0.1.3 bitops_1.0-9 RSQLite_2.3.7
## [7] digest_0.6.37 magrittr_2.0.3 evaluate_1.0.1
## [10] fastmap_1.2.0 blob_1.2.4 jsonlite_1.8.9
## [13] graph_1.85.0 DBI_1.2.3 BiocManager_1.30.25
## [16] httr_1.4.7 fansi_1.0.6 stringdist_0.9.12
## [19] XML_3.99-0.17 httr2_1.0.6 codetools_0.2-20
## [22] jquerylib_0.1.4 cli_3.6.3 rlang_1.1.4
## [25] dbplyr_2.5.0 Biobase_2.67.0 bit64_4.5.2
## [28] cachem_1.1.0 yaml_2.3.10 BiocBaseUtils_1.9.0
## [31] parallel_4.4.2 tools_4.4.2 memoise_2.0.1
## [34] dplyr_1.1.4 filelock_1.0.3 BiocGenerics_0.53.1
## [37] curl_6.0.0 RUnit_0.4.33 buildtools_1.0.0
## [40] vctrs_0.6.5 R6_2.5.1 stats4_4.4.2
## [43] biocViews_1.75.0 BiocFileCache_2.15.0 lifecycle_1.0.4
## [46] RBGL_1.83.0 bit_4.5.0 pkgconfig_2.0.3
## [49] bslib_0.8.0 pillar_1.9.0 glue_1.8.0
## [52] tidyselect_1.2.1 xfun_0.49 tibble_3.2.1
## [55] sys_3.4.3 knitr_1.49 htmltools_0.5.8.1
## [58] rmarkdown_2.29 maketools_1.3.1 compiler_4.4.2
## [61] RCurl_1.98-1.16
BiocCheck
SummaryBiocCheck
BiocCheck
be runBiocCheck
BiocCheck
output
BiocCheckGitClone
BiocCheckGitClone
BiocCheckGitClone
BiocCheckGitClone
output
BiocCheck