4.1 Generic CI/CD pipeline

Generally speaking, a CI/CD pipeline related to an R package is comprised of the following steps:

• setup a running environment
• check out the source code
• setup R
• install package dependencies (with caching), including their system requirements
• build and check the package
• deploy

GitHub Actions provides great flexibility in specifying and customizing each individual step, but many are covered by the R-specific actions provided by the r-lib/actions project. Most of these steps are implemented by default in Travis CI for an R package.