More on reproducibility… – Prompt 6

More on reproducibility…
Prompt
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Published

March 2, 2023

Prompt:

Frontmatter check Render rmarkdown

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.

1b. Go to your blog 4 repo, and run the command usethis::use_github_action("render-rmarkdown.yaml") This creates the file render-rmarkdown.yaml inside the folder .github/workflows in your repo. Add it to the repository and push it.

1c. Optional - but maybe educational: make a change to your Rmd file with the blog post (just a small change), and push it. Then go to your github site and watch the render-rmarkdown action fail.

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

  2. Add all dependencies to the environment (implicitly by installing all the dependencies or explicitly by listing dependencies in a DESCRIPTION file).

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

  4. 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?

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

Submit this blog post to your blog-6 repo.

Additional resources in case you get stuck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwVx_pf2uz4&ab_channel=PositPBC