Reproducibility

More on reproducibility…
Author

Sabrena Rutledge

Published

March 2, 2023

Frontmatter check Render rmarkdown

What happens when we change the Rmd file and commit?

In Blog 5 you had the first exposure to Github Actions. We just checked frontmatter compliance (as we do for this round). You see that we have added a second action - here, we are converting the Rmarkdown document to a markdown file by running render_rmarkdown on Github. This action passes successfully for this document. We want to do something similar for blog #4.

Now start reading …

Read the vignette Introduction to renv for the renv R package by Kevin Ushey.

Then do:

  1. Install the R package renv on your local machine.

  2. In the project for blog 4, initialize the workflow used by the renv package.

  3. Add all dependencies to the environment (implicitly by installing all the depepndencies or explicilty by listing dependencies in a DESCRIPTION file).

  4. Add the renv folder to your blog 4 repository, and push the changes.

  5. Is the github action working? Read any potential error messages in the workflow and try to fix things. Make sure to check stackoverflow for help, don’t forget our Discussion board!

Write a blog post addressing the following questions:

  1. What is the idea of the renv package?

The renv package is designed to store library paths to all of a projects’ necessary R packages and their dependencies. As such, it saves a list of all R packages’ versions being used in a project. Having all version numbers for a project’s required packages and dependencies is extremely helpful for reproducibility.

  1. In 50 to 100 words describe your experience working with renv. What went well? What did not go so well?

I have used renv in my personal projects and have not had an issue with it before. However, when trying to use renv and github together, I have not been successful. Within Rstudio, renv installed correctly and initialized correctly. Yet, the renv directory does not appear to push correctly to the global Github repo. As such, when trying to render the Rmarkdown, it fails when loading the first package.

Submit this blog post to your blog-6 repo.