More on reproducibility…

More on reproducibility…
Author

Parvin Mohammadiarvejeh

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? Parvin’s answer: renv package is an useful package to install, update and manage packages in various projects in a more robust way. In the other words, using renv, we can update/install packages in a specific project without any changes in the packages in the other projects. This advantage is useful to prevent conflicts when we work on the other projects;it means that other projects do not break (it is like a private library and environment). Furthermore, renv provides the ability to reproduce the previous versions of our work. In summary, renv provides a better management in projects individually.

  2. In 50 to 100 words describe your experience working with renv. What went well? What did not go so well? Parvin’s answer: My experience with renv package was smooth, fortunately. Using the instruction in the “Introduction to renv” I could get it done with a few number of committing. In the first rounds, I forgot to use “hydrate()” function and it did not work, but when I read the instruction again, I did the process again, step by step and I called the hydrate and it worked!

Submit this blog post to your blog-6 repo.