Version control can be very useful when developing data analysis scripts. For that reason, the popular development environment RStudio for the R programming language has built-in integration with Git. While some advanced Git features still require the command-line, RStudio has a nice interface for many common Git operations.
RStudio allows us to create a project associated with a given directory to keep track of various related files. To be able to track the development of the project over time, to be able to revert to previous versions, and to collaborate with others, we version control the Rstudio project with Git. To get started using Git in RStudio, we create a new project:
This opens a dialog asking us how we want to create the project. We have some options here. Let’s say that we want to use RStudio with the weather repository that we already made. Since that repository lives in a directory on our computer, we choose the option “Existing Directory”:
Next, RStudio will ask which existing directory we want to use. Click “Browse…” and navigate to the correct directory, then click “Create Project”:
Ta-da! We have created a new project in RStudio within the existing weather repository. Notice the vertical “Git” menu in the menu bar. RStudio has recognized that the current directory is a Git repository, and gives us a number of tools to use Git:
To edit the existing files in the repository, we can click on them in the “Files” panel on the lower right. Now let’s add some additional information about Hummus:
Once we have saved our edited files, we can use RStudio to commit the changes by clicking on “Commit…” in the Git menu:
This will open a dialogue where we can select which files to commit (by checking the appropriate boxes in the “Staged” column), and enter a commit message (in the upper right panel). The icons in the “Status” column indicate the current status of each file. Clicking on a file shows information about changes in the lower panel (using output of git diff). Once everything is the way we want it, we click “Commit”:
The changes can be pushed by selecting “Push Branch” from the Git menu. There are also options to pull from the remote repository, and to view the commit history:
If we click on “History”, we can see a graphical version of what git log would tell us:
RStudio creates a number of files that it uses to keep track of a project. We often don’t want to track these, in which case we add them to our .gitignore file:
Challenge
- Create a new directory within your project called
graphs. - Modify the
.gitignoreso that thegraphsdirectory is not version controlled.
Solution (Solution to Challenge). This can be done in Rstudio:
dir.create("./graphs")Then open up the .gitignore file from the right-hand panel of Rstudio and add graphs/ to the list of files to ignore.
There are many more features in the RStudio Git menu, but these should be enough to get you started!
Keypoints
- Using RStudio’s Git integration allows you to version control a project over time.