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:
   • Git from the command line and also from third party software
     
   • Use the ‘OpenSSL’ library
     
   • Checkout Windows-style, commit Unix-style line endings
     
   • Enable Git Credential Manager
     
   • If you run into any trouble, a more comprehensive tutorial on installing Git is available at happygitwithr.com.
4. Register on ‘GitHub’ (alternatively: see this vignette on how to use ‘GitLab’ or ‘Bitbucket’)
   • Go to github.com and click Sign up. Choose an “Individual”, “Free” plan.
   • Request a free academic upgrade. This allows you to create private repositories, which are only visible to you and selected collaborators, and can be made public when your work is published.
5. Connect ‘RStudio’ to Git and GitHub (for more support, see this ‘RStudio’ article, and this blog post)
   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:
   • If you receive any error saying There is no package called [package name], then run the code install.packages("package name")
     
   • If you are prompted to update packages, just press [ENTER] to avoid updating packages. Updating packages this way in an interactive session sometimes leads to errors if the packages are loaded.
     
   • If you see a pop-up dialog asking Do you want to install from sources the package which needs compilation?, click No.

install.packages("worcs", dependencies = TRUE)
tinytex::install_tinytex()
renv::consent(provided = TRUE)
worcs::git_user("your_name", "your_email")

If you intend to write documents in APA style, you should additionally install the papaja package. Unfortunately, this package is not yet available on the central R repository CRAN, but you can install it from ‘GitHub’ using the following code:

remotes::install_github("crsh/papaja", dependencies = TRUE, update = "never")

Because papaja has many dependencies, it is recommended to skip this step if you intend to write documents in a different style than APA.

That’s it! Everything should be installed and connected now.