Setting up your computer for WORCS

This is a tutorial on how to set up your personal computer for use with the worcs package. It guides you through the installation of several software packages, and registration on GitHub. This vignette does not assume a prior installation of R, so it is suitable for novice users. You only have to perform these steps once for every computer you intend to use R and worcs on, and the entire process should take approximately 30 minutes if you start from scratch. In case some of the software is already installed on your system, you can skip those related steps.

Follow these steps in order:

  1. Install R from https://CRAN.R-project.org
  2. Install ‘RStudio’ Desktop (Free) from rstudio.com
  3. Install Git from git-scm.com. Use the default, recommended settings. It is especially important to leave these settings selected:
  4. Register on ‘GitHub’ (alternatively: see this vignette on how to use ‘GitLab’ or ‘Bitbucket’)
  5. Connect ‘RStudio’ to Git and GitHub (for more support, see Happy Git with R
    1. Open ‘RStudio’, open the Tools menu, click Global Options, and click Git/SVN
    2. Verify that Enable version control interface for RStudio projects is selected
    3. Verify that Git executable: shows the location of git.exe. If it is missing, manually fix the location of the file.
    4. Click Create RSA Key. Do not enter a passphrase. Press Create. A window with some information will open, which you can close.
    5. Click View public key, and copy the entire text to the clipboard.
    6. Close ‘RStudio’ (it might offer to restart by itself; this is fine)
    7. Go to github.com
    8. Click your user icon, click Settings, and then select the SSH and GPG keys tab.
    9. Click New SSH key. Give it an arbitrary name (e.g., your computer ID), and paste the public key from your clipboard into the box labeled Key.
    10. Open ‘RStudio’ again (unless it restarted by itself)
  6. Install all packages required for WORCS by running the following code in the ‘RStudio’ console. Be prepared for three contingencies:
install.packages("worcs", dependencies = TRUE)
tinytex::install_tinytex()
renv::consent(provided = TRUE)

If you do not have a Git user set up on your computer yet (e.g., if this is the first time you will be using Git), run the following - making sure to substitute your actual username and email:

worcs::git_user("your_name", "your_email", overwrite = TRUE)

If you intend to write documents in APA style, you should additionally install the papaja package. Because papaja has many dependencies, it is recommended to skip this step if you intend to write documents in a different style than APA. Unfortunately, this package is not yet available on the central R repository CRAN, but you can install it from ‘GitHub’ using the following code:

install.packages("papaja", dependencies = TRUE, update = "never")

Everything should be installed and connected now. You can verify your installation using the convenience function worcs::check_worcs_installation(). It will run a test suite and print the results; in case any tests fail, it will provide a hint for how to resolve it:

worcs::check_worcs_installation()