setup-raven

June 28, 2026 · View on GitHub

A GitHub Action that installs the Raven CLI from prebuilt release binaries.

Raven is a static analyzer for the R programming language. It reads R projects without running them, follows source() chains, and flags issues such as undefined symbols, used-before-defined references, cross-file problems, and style issues. In CI, raven check gives R projects the kind of fast, side-effect-free pre-merge check that other language ecosystems take for granted.

Raven also powers editor features through the Language Server Protocol: diagnostics, completion, hover, go-to-definition, and other code intelligence use the same static scope model that raven check runs headlessly.

Raven's sibling project Sight provides the same static-analysis and language-server model for Stata. Together, Raven and Sight bring cross-file navigation, error detection, and code intelligence to two languages widely used in social science research; setup-raven and setup-sight make their headless CLI checks easy to install in CI.

Why this action exists

The released way to get Raven is a prebuilt binary from GitHub Releases. Installing it in CI by hand means detecting the runner's OS and architecture, downloading the right asset, verifying its checksum, and adding it to PATH. The other option — cargo install --git https://github.com/jbearak/raven raven — builds Raven from source, which needs Rust and Cargo and costs minutes of CI time on every run.

This action does the binary install for you: it detects the platform, downloads the matching release asset, verifies its published SHA-256 checksum, adds raven to PATH, and runs raven --version as a smoke test. No Rust, no compile.

It installs only. Beyond the --version smoke test it runs no raven subcommand — packages update/fetch/freeze, check, and lint are each an explicit run: step your workflow controls, so you keep full control over paths, flags, and severity thresholds.

Usage

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- uses: jbearak/setup-raven@v1
  with:
    version: latest
- run: raven packages update   # broad R-free CRAN/Bioconductor coverage
- run: raven check

Inputs

  • version — latest (default) or a Raven release tag. Pin a tag for fully reproducible CLI versions.

Supported runners

macOS, Windows, and Linux runners.

Package metadata

Provisioning the package-symbol database is left to your workflow:

  • raven packages update downloads Raven's broad CRAN/Bioconductor database.
  • raven packages fetch creates an ephemeral project-scoped .raven/packages.json from r-universe.
  • A committed .raven/packages.json from raven packages freeze is the reproducible, project-specific option.

See the Raven CLI docs for details.

License

GPL-3.0, the same license as Raven.