Data Carpentry in an open source project, and we welcome contributions of all kinds: new lessons, fixes to existing material, bug reports, and reviews of proposed changes are all welcome.
By contributing, you agree that we may redistribute your work under our license. In exchange, we will address your issues and/or assess your change proposal as promptly as we can, and help you become a member of our community. Everyone involved in Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry agrees to abide by our code of conduct.
Fork the datacarpentry/R-ecology-lesson repository
on GitHub. See the “Fork” button in the top-right corner of the
screen on the GitHub website.
Clone that repository to your own machine. (It is also possible to make minor edits right on GitHub.) At your terminal:
git clone https://github.com/your_username/R-ecology-lesson.git R-ecology-lesson
cd R-ecology-lesson
git remote add upstream https://github.com/datacarpentry/R-ecology-lesson.gitCreate a branch from master for your changes. Give
your branch a meaningful name, such as
fix-typos-dplyr-lesson or
add-tutorial-on-visualization. At your
terminal:
git checkout -b fix-typos-dplyr-lessonMake your changes to the Rmd file. If you’d like to check the rendered version of your changes, you can do one of three things:
GNU Make installed on your system, type
make at your shell terminal.rmarkdown::render_site("01-intro-to-r.Rmd") in your R
terminal (make sure your working directory is at the root of the lesson)
to generate the corresponding html file.Commit the Rmd file you edited
(git add file-you-changed.Rmd, followed by
git commit -m "fix typos in dplyr lesson"), and push your
changes to your repository on GitHub
(git push origin fix-typos-dplyr-lesson). If your change
affects a lesson, please only commit and push the
Rmd files. The rendered versions will be generated
by the lesson maintainers to avoid merge conflicts.
Send a pull request (PR) to the master branch of the
datacarpentry/R-ecology-lesson repository for this lesson
at https://github.com/datacarpentry/R-ecology-lesson
If it is easier for you to send edits to us some other way, please mail us at board@datacarpentry.org. Given a choice between you creating content or wrestling with Git, we’d rather have you doing the former.
Each lesson is composed of files such as
00-before-we-start.Rmd, 01-intro-to-r.Rmd and
so on. (We use two digits followed by a topic key to ensure files appear
in the right order when listed.)
For the R material, lessons must be written in RMarkdown (ending in
Rmd). A Makefile converts the Rmd files into HTML that are
processed by Jekyll (the tool GitHub uses to create websites) as
explained in the
README file.
Important Note: We use the purl() function from
knitr to generate a skeleton file that contains code to be
distributed to the workshop participants. This strategy is useful in
particular for error-prone pieces of code (e.g., if it contains long
URLs). To take full advantage, every line of code that should be
included in the handout must be enclosed in an
R code chunk with purl=TRUE in the chunk
options. Further, to aid students’ use of the handout code, consider
including explanatory comments. When writing Challenges in particular,
you may need to include redundant comments and used the chunk option
echo=FALSE. When in doubt, consult the Rmd
files for examples.
Images (e.g., screenshots) go into the img/ folder.
Graphics generated by some R code also go into this folder and get the
prefix R-ecology-. This latter case is handled
automatically with some knitr options in the setup.R
file.
Raw data go into data_raw/. However, at this stage, this
folder is created programmatically and only contain dataset downloaded
directly from the Figshare repository. In other words, it can be safely
be deleted (e.g. using make clean-data or
make clean.)
The data/ folder only contains data generated/exported
by R code.
The site_libs folder is generated by the
rmarkdown package and holds the javascript, css, and
fonts used by the website.
We aim to have our lessons be as self-contained as possible. Images and other external resources should be included in the repository whenever possible.
We don’t store data for lessons inside the lesson repositories. For completed lessons the data should be publicly available in a data repository appropriate to the data type. For lesson development the data may be provided in any way that is convenient including posting to a website, on figshare, a public Dropbox link, a GitHub gist, or even included in the pull request (PR). Once the PR is ready to merge the data should be placed in the official data repository and all links to the data updated.
To ensure a consistent formatting of the lessons, we recommend the following guidelines:
function() while
variables are written as variable, and package names as
package.## Use this format for headers
And not this format
-------------------Page built on: 📆 2023-04-18 ‒ 🕢 13:22:21
Data Carpentry, 2014-2019.
Questions? Feedback?
Please file
an issue on GitHub.
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