Introduction to version control for research

This tutorial introduces a basic workflow for version control using git and the popular online hosting service, GitHub. The aim is to provide a starting point for researchers who want to curate and distribute their code.

You can choose to follow either the tutorial on Using git on the command line or Using git through RStudio.

Preliminaries

Make sure that you have what you need to get started

Using git on the command line

• Getting started Start using git through a command line interface
• Working with version control Working on your project in the version control framework
• Connecting to a remote repository Using GitHub as remote storage for your project
• Subsequent workflow Making updates to your project
• When things go wrong A very quick intro for coping when things go wrong when you’re using git
• Summary What we’ve learned and further steps

Using git through RStudio

• Setting up a version controlled project Setting up a git project in RStudio
• Getting started with version control Setting up and using version control in RStudio
• Setting up a remote repository Using GitHub as remote storage for your project
• Subsequent workflow Making further changes to your project
• Summary What we’ve learned and further steps

Citations

The sections of this tutorial dealing with RStudio and GitHub were adapted from (1).

(1) (Mike Croucher & Anna Krystalli. (2016). Introduction to version control with RStudio [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.61435)