Advice for vcr in CI/CD?

[hadley]

If you use vcr for all your tests, you're vulnerable to the server API changing so that real code no longer works. It feels like the solution to this is to have a cron job (maybe once a day?) rerun your tests (only, not a full R CMD check) with vcr disabled. Do you have this advice written up and fleshed out somewhere?

[sckott]

• There's https://books.ropensci.org/http-testing/real-requests-chapter.html#how-to-make-real-requests - you can turn vcr off with an env var and do e.g., VCR_TURN_OFF=true Rscript -e "devtools::test()"
• There's the config option re_record_interval - see https://github.com/ropensci/vcr/blob/main/R/cassette_class.R#L513-L548 - Though to be honest I haven't used it. It could be used though - assuming it works - to have a single GH action that sometimes records new cassettes depending on how long ago the cassettes were recorded.
• I've done a cron job before to rewrite cassettes on a schedule (1/week) in some Python projects that use the main python vcr pkg - and the rewrites open up a PR for a human to review - but one could have the changes committed directly to main too

TBH I'm not sure I'm confident what the best practice is. And anyway it probably depends on the use case, so advice should I think consist of a few options depending on the use case

[sckott]

we can move this to the next milestone unless you want to address for v2

[hadley]

Yeah, next one I think.