gavinfay / cinar-mse Goto Github PK

How to get the workshop materials onto your computer.

The easiest way is to set up a RStudio project on your machine that is linked to this github repository. This will allow you to bring updated files over the week.

You can also download the files directly.

1. Open RStudio
2. Under the Project drop-down in the top-right click "New Project"
   
3. Click "Version Control (Checkout a project from a version control repository"
   
4. Choose "Git (Clone a project from a Git repository)"
   
5. Enter the repository url https://github.com/gavinfay/cinar-mse, and choose "Browse" to tell your computer where on your machine you want to create the new project (choose your favorite file location).
6. Hit "Create Project"
   
7. RStudio will then spend a few seconds downloading the files for the workshop on to your computer, and will then start your new project.
8. Et voila! The project should say cinar-mse, and you can see the workshop files in the bottom right pane of the RStudio window.
   

Participants have the option of using RStudio Cloud for these workshops.
Before the workshops, please visit Rstudio Cloud and create a free account.
Free accounts give limited usage, but are more than enough for these workshops.

Why RStudio Cloud? We want to maximize time during our workshops for learning, and not on tech support. Using a standard way of interacting with the course material makes this easier, and avoids the hassles of multiple installation types, versions of R, etc. You may wish to set up R and RStudio on your local machine but that will not be required here.

Our Rstudio Cloud project.

Using Rstudio Cloud project
Visit the project and log in to your account.
It will take about 30s or so to create a version of the Rstudio project in your workspace.
You will then have a full copy of the workshop files, etc. Importantly, the packages that we will be using for the exercises are already installed.
This is a temporary copy of the project - to save your work, you need to create a permanent copy.
To do this, hit the "make a permanent copy" button at the top-right.

You will then have your own copy of the project in the account that won't go away when you log out, and can come back to.

Updating your copy of the project
As workshop materials get updated and added, you will want to be able to bring these in to your version of the project so you can work on the new exercises, etc.
To do this, you need to do a pull from the github repository where the project files are located.
This sounds complicated, but it is pretty easy to do.
In the 'Git' tab on the environment panel (top-right panel on the default layout), click on the 'pull' icon (arrow pointing downwards):

This will bring in the new files and then you'll be able to use them on Rstudio cloud.

Exercises location
There are a lot of files in the project, because they contain the slide decks, plus the files needed to create the bookdown website that we are using to navigate the course materials.

The .Rmd files containing the assignment exercises will be located in the project at the following folders within the project (click on the folders in the bottom right pane to navigate through):
"materials/exercises/"

If a DESCRIPTION file is added (usethis::use_description()) to the repo (repo doesn't need to be a package) which lists the package dependencies of the project, then a user can use the remotes package to install all dependencies prior to running the code using install_deps()