C Version control with Git and GitHub

This Chapter will introduce you to the basics of using a version control system to keep track of all your important R code and facilitate collaboration with colleagues and the wider world. This Chapter will focus on using the software ‘Git’ in combination with the web-based hosting service ‘GitHub’. By the end of the Chapter, you will be able to install and configure Git and GitHub on your computer and setup and work with a version controlled project in RStudio. We won’t be covering more advanced topics such as branching, forking and pull requests in much detail but we do give an overview later on in the Chapter.

Just a few notes of caution. In this Chapter we’ll be using RStudio to interface with Git as it gives you a nice friendly graphical user interface which generally makes life a little bit easier (and who doesn’t want that?). However, one downside to using RStudio with Git is that RStudio only provides pretty basic Git functionality through its menu system. That’s fine for most of what we’ll be doing during this Chapter (although we will introduce a few Git commands as we go along) but if you really want to benefit from using Git’s power you will need to learn some Git commands and syntax. This leads us on to our next point. We’re not going to lie, Git can become a little bewildering and frustrating when you first start using it. This is mostly due to the terminology and liberal use of jargon associated with Git, but there’s no hiding the fact that it’s quite easy to get yourself and your Git repository into a pickle. Therefore, we’ve tried hard to keep things as straight forward as we can during this Chapter and as a result we do occasionally show you a couple of very ‘un-Git’ ways of doing things (mostly about reverting to previous versions of documents). Don’t get hung up about this, there’s no shame to using these low tech solutions and if it works then it works. Lastly, GitHub was not designed to host very large files and will warn you if you try to add files greater than 50 MB and block you adding files greater than 100 MB. If your project involves using large file sizes there are a few solutions but we find the easiest solution is to host these files elsewhere (Googledrive, Dropbox etc) and create a link to them in a README file or R markdown document on Github.