From an R Package to a Marketplace Action
Swechhya Bista's entry into GitHub Actions started with a routine inconvenience. She had built her own R package, excelR, and wanted automated build checks and code coverage reports. The standard solution required maintaining external accounts with two separate services, which felt like unnecessary overhead for what should be a simple process.
After building my own R package I wanted to automate the build checks and code coverage. For that I had to make external accounts in two different services. With the help of GitHub Actions I was could do all the checks without any external accounts.
Actions eliminated that friction. The setup was straightforward — so much so that Bista found it difficult to believe at first. Instead of wiring together third-party services, she could define the entire CI workflow directly in her repository.
Building Something Missing
The turning point came when she searched the GitHub Marketplace for a solution tailored to the R language. R is a statistical programming language commonly used by mathematicians, data scientists, and analysts, and its ecosystem has its own conventions for package validation. Despite the breadth of the Marketplace, Bista couldn't locate an action that fit her needs. So she built R Action and published it for others to use.
The action simplifies running R package checks and coverage collection. Her favorite aspect of the platform is the deep repository integration:
It's has easy integration with code repositories without use of any external accounts.
That integration removes a whole category of configuration problems. No token wrangling, no plumbing between CI and code hosting — just a workflow file that runs on push.
Testing, Bugs, and What's Next
Building the action itself presented one main obstacle: thoroughly testing it to flush out bugs. For developers who are comfortable debugging their own tooling, that's a surmountable hurdle, and the payoff is a reusable component for the community.
Bista isn't stopping at package checks. She has started work on a GitHub Action for code coverage analysis, which would provide another layer of visibility into test quality. Her current and upcoming projects are visible on her GitHub profile.
Getting Started Yourself
Bista's story highlights a common path into Actions: you hit a real limitation, you look for an existing solution, and if none exists, you build one. To begin learning the mechanics, GitHub offers a Learning Lab course covering the fundamentals. R Action itself is available on the GitHub Marketplace alongside hundreds of other community-built actions.
