Make a new course

Last updated on 2025-07-01 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • How do I make a new course-page based on this??

Objectives

  • Explain how to make a new lesson based on this template
  • Provide a checklist for doing so

This page is defined as a template-repo at GitHub. That means, that you can easily initialize a new repository based on this page.

Go to the main page of the repo you want to make a template.

Click “settings”, and, just under the box where you can change the repository name, you will find a tick-box called “Template repository”. Tick it.

Go to the github-repo, and click on the green button “Use this template”. Choose “Create a new repository”.

Giv the new repository a name. We prefer to let our R-courses begin with “R-”.

Make sure the repository is placed under “KUBDatalab”, if you want it to be part of our eco-system. Otherwise, place it wherever you want.

Also make sure that the repository is “Public”.

After GitHub have initialized the new repository based on this template, you need to edit the “config.yaml” file.

  • title - selfexplanatory
  • created - the date you did all this.
  • source - change it to the url of the new github-repo. This makes it easier to edit the page in the future.
  • episodes - remove all episodes not to be included in your new course. Change the order if necessary.

Either do this directly on GitHub, or follow the usual process of forking to your own GitHub account, and cloning the repo to your computer.

You will also need to update the CITATION.cff file, otherwise the citation will point to this site, rather than your own.

You can use https://citation-file-format.github.io/cff-initializer-javascript/#/ to edit the existing, or make a new one.

Consider deleting stuff

When the page is generated, the scripts identifies all libraries used in all episodes. Even if these episodes will not be shown on the page.

This requires the scripts to download and install all these libraries. And that takes time!

If you delete all unused episodes, you will speed up the following step considerably.

After you have committed your changes to config.yaml, actions begins building the site. Have patience! The first build of the R-PUFF site took 54 minutes.

Don’t worry, future changes are a lot faster. An update of the page you are currently reading, took 6 minutes. The scripts only rebuild the pages that are changed.

You can follow the process under “Actions” on the repo.

When all actions have run - look for the green checkmarks, go to “Settings”, choose “Pages”.

renv messes things up!

Sandpaper uses the renv environment manager to handle dependencies in the packages you use. But that handling appears to be different on a windows machine and on the virtual Linux machine that GitHub actions uses.

So: DO NOT COMMIT AND PUSH ANY renv TO GITHUB. IT WILL BREAK THE GENERATION OF THE PAGES.

If you do - delete the renv directory.

Under “Build and deployment”, we are told that the page is “deployed from a branch”, and below that, you can choose which branch. Chose “gh-pages”.

Click “Save”. GitHub actions begins again, but do not worry, this step is very fast (depending on a lot of things, we are not paying GitHub, so we depend on shared ressources).

Changes are local

You have made a new repo based on the master-version of the toolbox. Any changes made to R-toolbox, will not affect your new page.

Changes made on your new page are similarly not affecting R-toolbox.

Editing

There are a lot of useful information on https://carpentries.github.io/sandpaper-docs

Updating

You have a course based on this. Time have passed and there is an update here, that you would like to incorporate in your course.

The easiest way to update is to simply copy the relevant episode from here, to your own local repo. Then commit, push etc.

Remember that any changes you have made will be gone!

Key Points

  • It is fairly easy to make a new course page
  • Have patience!