Please note that projectlog is still under active development.
Until the first official release, any new changes are potentially
breaking changes.
Good project management and documentation is a crucial part any
researcher’s workflow. Not only does it make your own life easier, but
it makes it easier to share your code, data, and other materials with
other researchers. projectlog helps researchers managing and
documenting their project from start to finish. The three core aims of
projectlog are to help with:
- Initiation: Set up or convert your R project following best practices using a convenient project template.
- Documentation: Easily keep track of important milestones, such as preregistrations, first-time data access, and article submissions and revisions.
- Communication: Create a clear, reproducible, and verifiable history of your project—including major milestones—to show what you did and when you did it to others (e.g., reviewers or readers of your article).
projectlog uses Git and GitHub throughout all stages of the project.
If you are already using git in your workflow to track your changes and
share your code and materials, projectlog provides functionality that
automates common steps and helps you get the most out of the information
that Git stores for you. If you are not familiar with Git—or if the mere
mention of it strikes fear into your heart—then projectlog is set up
in a way that you rarely have to interact with Git directly. For
example, initiating a new project using the projectlog template
automatically creates a connected repository on GitHub, and the core
steps of documenting project changes on GitHub are made easy through the
convenience functions such as projectlog::log_milestone or
projectlog::log_changes. See Get
started
and the
Vignettes for
more detailed information.
One of the main aims of projectlog is that it can be used by people
who are not (intimately) familiar with Git or GitHub. However, you will
still need to to three things to ensure that projectlog works
properly:
(1) Create a free account on
GitHub
(2) Install
Git on your device
(3) Make sure R
knows where to find git on your device
These three steps are described in more detail in This Vignette. Note that you only have to complete step 1 once, and only have to repeat steps 2 and 3 when you switch devices.
You can install the development version of projectlog from GitHub as
follows:
# install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github("StefanVermeent/projectlog")See Get started for examples of how to use projectlog.