Part 44 Organizing Your Project Folders

Follow a consistent folder structure for all of your projects. This will make it easier for you to say organized and make your code, data, and projects easy to share.

In your project’s root folder, you should have a README.md file and a .Rproj project. Then, you should have folders that separate different types of files:

• data: Stores all of your data files for a project

  • Have subfolders for different dates, waves, groups, etc. as needed
  • If you plan on saving cleaned data, having separate data_raw and data folders is a good idea.

• output: Stores any output your scripts generate

  • Depending on how many figures and other output files you will create, you might want to split/subfolder this into figures, reports, etc.

You might add additional folders, such as:

• tests: A folder that includes tests to check that your scripts or results are accurate. Check out the testthat package.

• templates: A folder to hold template files (e.g., RMarkdown templates, Word templates, CSS files for HTML output, TeX templates for PDF output)

• admin: For administrative documents (e.g., IRB approval, grant information)

• doc: For documentation (e.g., variable codebooks, style guides)

• R or src or scripts: Folders to store functions and scripts that you call from your markdown (e.g., a data import and cleaning script)

  • Use folders or subfolders for each language if you are programming in multiple languages: R, python, sql, C, etc.
  • Can put them all in a generic scripts or src folder if not too many

• markdown: If you have multiple RMarkdown documents for your project, consider putting them into a subfolder