cff-validator

A GitHub action to validate CITATION.cff files with R.

Introduction

If you have a Citation File Format (cff) on your repository this action would check its validity against the defined schema.

A full valid workflow:

on:
  push:
    paths:
      - CITATION.cff
  workflow_dispatch:

name: CITATION.cff
jobs:
  Validate-CITATION-cff:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Validate CITATION.cff
    env:
      GITHUB_PAT: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Validate CITATION.cff
        uses: dieghernan/cff-validator@v3

On error, the action produces a Job Summary with a high-level description of the errors found:

citation_cff_errors.md

field	message
data	has additional properties
data.authors.0	no schemas match
data.doi	referenced schema does not match
data.keywords.0	is the wrong type
data.license	referenced schema does not match
data.url	referenced schema does not match

See Guide to Citation File Format schema version 1.2.0 for debugging.

For more examples, see the actions provided on this path.

Add a badge to your repo

You can easily create a badge showing the current status of validation of your CITATION.cff like this:

See a quick demo:

Inputs available

• citation-path: Path to .cff file to be validated. By default it selects a CITATION.cff file on the root of the repository:

  - name: Validate CITATION.cff
    uses: dieghernan/cff-validator@v3
    with:
      citation-path: "examples/CITATION.cff"

• cache-version: default 1. If you need to invalidate the existing cache pass any other number and a new cache will be used.

• install-r: default false. If true download and install R during the setup. If false use the existing installation in the GitHub Action image.

See a full featured implementation on this example.

For useRs

This action runs on R. For the same functionality you can use the cffr package:

cffr::cff_validate("CITATION.cff")
#> 
#> cff_validate results——
#> Congratulations! This .cff file is valid

See cffr::cff_validate() for details.

References

Druskat, S., Spaaks, J. H., Chue Hong, N., Haines, R., Baker, J., Bliven, S., Willighagen, E., Pérez-Suárez, D., & Konovalov, A. (2021). Citation File Format (Version 1.2.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5171937