GitHub Actions for R-Shiny + renv + automatic system dependencies

auto-sys-dep-shiny-renv.yml

env:
  RENV_PATHS_ROOT: ~/.local/share/renv
  
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        config:
          - {os: ubuntu-latest, r: 'release', rspm: "https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/cran/__linux__/focal/latest"}
    env:
      R_REMOTES_NO_ERRORS_FROM_WARNINGS: true
      RSPM: ${{ matrix.config.rspm }}
      GITHUB_PAT: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
    
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v1
      with:
        r-version: ${{ matrix.config.r }}
    - name: Install Sys dependencies
      shell: bash {0}
      run: |
        Rscript -e "install.packages('remotes')" -e "remotes::install_github('mdneuzerling/getsysreqs')"
        sysreqs=$(Rscript -e "cat(getsysreqs::apt_get_install('renv.lock', distribution = 'ubuntu', release = '20.04'))")
        echo $sysreqs
        sudo apt-get update
        sudo -s eval "$sysreqs"
    - name: Cache packages
      uses: actions/cache@v1
      with:
        path: ${{ env.RENV_PATHS_ROOT }}
        key: ${{ runner.os }}-renv-${{ hashFiles('**/renv.lock') }}
        restore-keys: |
          ${{ runner.os }}-renv-
    - name: Restore packages
      shell: Rscript {0}
      run: |
        if (!requireNamespace("renv", quietly = TRUE)) install.packages("renv")
        options(repos = c(RSPM = "https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/all/latest"))
        renv::restore()
    - name: Run tests
      shell: Rscript {0}
      run: |
        shiny::runTests(".", assert = TRUE)

This gist should probably be optimized. I'm not an expert on github actions but I suspect you could rewrite this so that you automatically substitute the correct OS version on line 33 in the getsysreqs::apt_get_install() call.

Other notes:

1. This is largely adapted from this article by @mdneuzerling -- who developed the getsysreqs() package.
2. It is also adapted from this article on renv with CI/CD.
3. And finally, I found that I needed to change sudo eval to sudo -s eval because I was getting an error referenced here.
4. I also had to add cat() infront of getsysreqs::apt_get_install() because, otherwise, the default print() would be used and there was a [1] being captured in the sysreqs variable.