11  Additional topics

11.1 Avoid making commits with lots changes

  • Do not commit changes to many files with a single commit message such as “Edits”!

  • Note that in a commit we can see the added lines - green highlight with + prefix - and deleted lines - red highligh with - prefix

11.2 Writing good commit messages

  • Follow the standard recommendations about making commit messages, see

11.3 Files for Git to ignore

  • You should not commit all files in the folder on your computer into your repo

  • The .gitignore file is a list of files and folders in your repo for Git to ignore

  • Common files to ignore are

    • .Rhistory
    • .DS_Store
    • if using an RStudio project ignore the .Rproj.user directory with syntax .Rproj.user/

  • It is helpful to setup a global .gitignore file to ignore certain operating system files from all of your repositories, e.g., .DS_Store on macOS or Thumbs.db on Windows. To do this on macOS, following the example here, we could run the following commands in a shell

    echo ".DS_Store" > ~/.gitignore_global
git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

11.4 GitHub repos contain more than just code

  • A repo for an R package will probably contain

    • The code for the R package

    • The code for its website (often made with pkgdown and hosted with GitHub Pages or Netlify)

    • Scripts for controlling continuous integration services such as GitHub Actions