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projectlog

Please note that projectlog is still under active development. Until the first official release, any new changes are potentially breaking changes.

The purpose of projectlog

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:

  1. Initiation: Set up or convert your R project following best practices using a convenient project template.
  2. Documentation: Easily keep track of important milestones, such as preregistrations, first-time data access, and article submissions and revisions.
  3. 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.

Before we start… Setting up Git

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.

Installation

You can install the development version of projectlog from GitHub as follows:

# install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github("StefanVermeent/projectlog")

Example

See Get started for examples of how to use projectlog.