Making your projects open can feel daunting, but there are some free tools that can get you up and running with a custom website quickly. This hands-on workshop will show you how to visualise data and create a website using R, tidyverse, quarto, and GitHub. We will start with a complete template, so no coding experience is required. Participants are encouraged to set up a GitHub account before the session, install R and RStudio on their laptop, and install the tidyverse and quarto packages.

Bring your laptop! Complete beginners more than welcome!

Requirements

  • Install R and RStudio (see here if you have trouble)

  • Install packages (via the RStudio console)

    install.packages("tidyverse")
install.packages("quarto")
install.packages("usethis")

  • Set up git and github (it is OK if you can’t install git on your laptop)

Cloning this website

If you have git set up on your computer and your github PAT set in the environment, you can create a fork of this website. Set the destination directory to where you want to keep the files locally.

usethis::create_from_github(
  repo_spec = "UKRN/free-tools",
  destdir = ".",
  fork = TRUE
)

Creating a site from scratch

Use the menu to create a new quarto website (or blog, book, report, presentation, etc.).

File > New Project... > New Directory... > New Quarto Website

Resources