Should I make an R Project for each assignment or all the assignments at once?

[ykdojo]

Meaning, should I have multiple R projects in my repo or a single R project?

[samhinshaw]

I believe @jennybc was advocating against multiple R projects, because then you would have nested R projects which could get messy. If I understood correctly, I believe the advice was simply to have one master R project containing subfolders with their own readme.mds. To organize this in RStudio, you can use the setwd() command when changing between, say, updating your "Master" readme.md and working on a specific homework assignment. Then, commit changes for the entire repository at once.

Your question is mentioned tangentially in the General Homework Guidelines under "Organization of your coursework repository".

I was also planning on spending some time looking through The unreasonable effectiveness of GitHub browsability before I got too far down the rabbit hole.

[BattaLiu]

@jennybc
A related question, should we organize our local file that holds the master Rproject as the repository in Github? Or they will be the same every time we push our stuff?

[jennybc]

I advocate a one to one to one mapping between:

• a directory on your computer (it can have subdirectories!)
• an RStudio Project (just a directory w/ a .Rproj file)
• a Git repo, that is connected to a GitHub remote

So @yosukesugishita NO I don't recommend multiple RStudio projects in a single repo. Now conceptually you could have a few "projects". In fact, think your course repo that way. You'll submit some work each week -- definitely separate little projects -- but they live together in one RStudio Project and Git repo.

@samhinshaw Thanks for your answer and links. Helpful!

@BattaLiu Not sure I completely follow. Am hoping what I said above answers your question?

[namanpaul]

@BattaLiu I hope this helps, as per the "sample" repository @jennybc showed in the class today. Our repository would look like:

MAIN REPOSITORY

• Homework directory
  • hw1 directory with all files for hw, easy to organize locally, and then push it
  • hw2
  • hw3
  • hw4... and so on.

Say, we are working in hw2 directory, created R markdown script, hw2.Rmd ; we need to be sure about having this hw2 directory as our current working directory, and everything would go smoothly.

Please suggest if this is correct @jennybc

[ykdojo]

Thank you for your comments, everyone.

I was wondering, what's the purpose of having an RStudio project in the first place?
What's the advantage of making an RStudio project over just using a simple folder?

[cheny19]

Having an RStudio project is that it helps you to group inputs, outputs and source files and other related files together. If you re-open the project, you can still see history commands.

For more detailed explanation, you can read here: https://stat545-ubc.github.io/block002_hello-r-workspace-wd-project.html#rstudio-projects, and here: https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200526207-Using-Projects

[jennybc]

The two main purposes of having an RStudio project, beyond merely having the discipline to designate one directory per R project:

• The foo.Rproj file gives you something to click on and launch an instance of R/RStudio, with working directory and a file browser pointed at a specific place.
• Project-specific preferences about all sorts of things can be stored with the project (look at all the stuff that's configurable from Tools > Project Options.

This can mostly be achieved in an RStudio-free way (I was an Emacs + ESS user for > 10 years), but I find the RStudio Project approach is simply slicker.

Also, once your Projects start to have additional structure, such as being an R package or a build-able project with a Makefile, I'm pretty sure the RStudio Project-hood is necessary for some of the convenient support RStudio offers.