Course Template Repository

This repository contains a template for our courses, which are built using Quarto.

Training Developers

See our course template page for guidelines on setup, how to render the course site, how files/directories are organised, and what the conventions used for lesson content.

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Maintainers (Bioinformatics Training Team)

Starting a New Course Repository

• Create a new empty directory for the course.
• Cd into that directory and run: quarto use template --no-prompt cambiotraining/quarto-course-template.
• Tidy the files for the new course (you can copy/paste this whole code block - unless you're on Mac, then you may need to use curl instead of wget):

  # clean materials directory
  rm materials/*.md
  # rename VS Code and Rproj files
  mv course-template.code-workspace $(basename $(pwd)).code-workspace
  mv course-template.Rproj $(basename $(pwd)).Rproj
  # fix path to logos
  sed 's/_extensions/_extensions\/cambiotraining/g' _quarto.yml > _temp.yml
  rm _quarto.yml; mv _temp.yml _quarto.yml
  # copy github action
  mkdir -p .github/workflows/
  wget -O .github/workflows/publish_site.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cambiotraining/quarto-course-template/main/.github/workflows/publish_site.yml
  # copy gitignore
  wget -O .gitignore https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cambiotraining/quarto-course-template/main/.gitignore

• Create a README, adjusting the heading to match the course name and add any other information you think is suitable:

  echo "# Course Name
  
  This repository contains the materials for the course.
  
  **Course Developers**: see our [guidelines page](https://cambiotraining.github.io/quarto-course-template/materials.html) if contributing materials.
  
  These materials are released under a [CC BY 4.0](LICENSE.md) license.
  " > README.md

• Edit the title of the course in index.md.
• Edit the materials/_chapters.yml file to match your repository skeleton (at least the first 5 lines should be included).
• If you discussed the outline of the course with the training developers, then create the directory structure in materials/ and even create some minimal files for them (these can be added to materials/_chapters.yml).
• Initialise the repository:

  git init
  git add .github/ .gitignore *
  git commit -m "first commit"
  git branch -M main

• Create a new repository on GitHub, and then add/push your files as you would normally do for a new repository.
• After the first push, the site will be rendered to the gh-pages branch automatically. This may take a while (you can check the "Actions" tab of the repository to monitor its progress). Once the gh-pages branch has been created, go to the repository's "Settings > Pages" and select the gh-pages branch to render your pages.

Converting an existing repository

If you already have course materials using a different template and want to use this template instead, you will need to copy some files to your existing repository.
This will vary depending on the specific template you were using, but the easiest might be to basically start from scratch. Here is a potential workflow:

• Follow the instructions above for starting a new repository, but do not initialise it as a Git repository.
• Copy your existing markdown/ipynb files to the materials/ directory (and organise them into sub-directories if suitable).
• Edit the following files:
  • materials/_chapters.yml - adjust the layout of your sections.
  • index.md - adjust the content for the front page (you may have this content already, and just need to copy/paste it here).
  • setup.md - if you had instructions for installing software, copy them here.
• Test building the website with: quarto render. Your website homepage should be in _site/index.html.
• Update the syntax used for exercises, callout boxes, tabsets, etc.
• Once everything is working on this directory, you can remove all the files from your existing repository and copy these files into it.
  Make sure to include hidden files (.github/ directory and .gitignore file).
• Push all the changes to GitHub and make sure that GitHub pages are being built from the gh-pages branch (you can adjust this in Settings if not).

Maintaining the Repository

Clean-up frozen HTML files

We use the _freeze feature of Quarto to ensure that the site builds successfully (without the need to manage complicated software dependencies). With time, this directory may become large and it might be a good idea to purge its history (as it's not really needed for versioning). We can use the BFG Repo-Cleaner to retain only the latest commit of those files.
You can easily install BFG with conda install -c conda-forge bfg or brew install bfg.

To purge the _freeze history, make a fresh clone of the repository and run:

bfg --delete-folders _freeze
git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now --aggressive
git push --force

After this, the _freeze directory will have no history (only the latest commit). This should shrink the repository size, especially for courses with lots of plotting output.

⚠️ Important:

• This is a history-destructive action, however no files should be deleted. Still, it's probably best to make a backup of the repository until you check the website renders correctly after the cleanup.
• Do this when there is no active development of materials, because this will cause merge conflicts when other people pull from the repo. Anyone working on the materials should probably make a fresh clone of the repository next time they want to do work on it.

Update course template

If there are changes to our course template format (e.g. the CSS themes are updated), you can propagate these changes by running quarto update extension cambiotraining/quarto-course-template.

⁉️ Note: not sure that a fresh re-render is actually needed - the _freeze folder doesn't hold the html files themselves, only the output from code chunks (such as .png files, etc.). This needs to be double-checked, but leaving the instructions below for reference.

If you do this, you will need to re-render the whole website:

git rm -r _freeze
quarto render
git add _freeze
git commit -m "fresh website render"

Note: you may want to purge the history of the _freeze directory after doing a full website re-render (see above).