cranlint

The goal of cranlint is to catch common, easy-to-miss mistakes made when preparing an R package for CRAN submission – things like hardcoded random seeds, DESCRIPTION formatting issues, and writes to .GlobalEnv – that complement (rather than duplicate) tools like urlchecker, lintr, and spelling. Many of the checks used in the package are heuristics: do not treat the output as a definitive diagnostic. It exists to help detect common problems, but cannot serve as an authoritative source.

Installation

You can install the development version of cranlint from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
# pak::pak("djnavarro/cranlint")
install.packages("cranlint", repos = c('https://djnavarro.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

Example

lint_cran() runs every cranlint check against a package and returns a single tibble of findings. Here it’s pointed at a tiny example package with two easy-to-miss issues: a one-sentence Description field, and a hardcoded set.seed() call inside a function.

library(cranlint)

pkg_dir <- tempfile("examplepkg")
dir.create(file.path(pkg_dir, "R"), recursive = TRUE)

writeLines(
  c(
    "Package: examplepkg",
    "Title: An Example Package",
    "Version: 0.0.1",
    "Authors@R: person(\"Jane\", \"Doe\", email = \"jane@example.com\", role = c(\"aut\", \"cre\"))",
    "Description: Does a thing.",
    "License: MIT + file LICENSE"
  ),
  file.path(pkg_dir, "DESCRIPTION")
)

writeLines(
  c(
    "simulate <- function() {",
    "  set.seed(42)",
    "  rnorm(1)",
    "}"
  ),
  file.path(pkg_dir, "R", "simulate.R")
)

lint_cran(pkg_dir)
#> # A tibble: 2 × 6
#>   check              file          line severity   message      policy_reference
#>   <chr>              <chr>        <int> <ord>      <chr>        <chr>           
#> 1 description_length DESCRIPTION     NA should_fix The Descrip… https://contrib…
#> 2 hardcoded_seed     R/simulate.R     2 should_fix set.seed() … https://contrib…