Previous steps

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Context

As part of the Knowledge management and version control for this training course, we will be sharing a data repository that contains the raw data, scripts and other resources for the project. This will provide course participants the opportunity to familiarise themselves with working with shared data repositories, the skills to maintain their own collaborative projects and to link with other GCRMN regional nodes globally.

This page outlines the basic steps for creating a local copy of the data course project to use as part of your training.

The steps described below follow the process when collaborating with other users. The method was based on the original WIO data course from July - August 2021 and describe a typical repository set up in Github.

We have created a copy of the training materials that you can use to practice your git skills on. You can find the repository here

Setting up a data repository

After setting up a Github username, you would have received an email message looking something like this:

After accepting the invitation, you will be able to see the main page of the repository in Github. This shows the basic folder structure of the project, details of the project and tabs to various functions of the Github platform:

To create a local copy of the repository on your computer, the Code button shows a URL address for the project, which is here:

https://github.com/CORDIOEA/CORDIOEA-WIO-GCRMN-data-training-course

Once copying the address to the clipboard, PC users will want to open the Gitbash program. This opens a “terminal” window. Users will want to navigate to the location where they want to clone the repository using the cd command. During the training course, we will provide course participants with assistance in doing this.

In general, it is useful for all collaborators to clone the repository in the same locality (e.g. on users Desktop folder).

Once safely navigated to the location for the clone, the command to create the clone in Gitbash is relatively simple:

git clone https://github.com/CORDIOEA/CORDIOEA-WIO-GCRMN-data-training-course

For those working on OS X, this command is done in the Terminal.app program.

This will create an exact copy of the Github project on your local computer. It is this copy that we will work on during the training course.

Next Steps

Now that we have successfully created a local copy of the repository on our computer, we can begin working with coral reef monitoring data and code. For a next step, we will look at the general workflow for this project and how to document and follow the step-by-step procedures for data cleaning, standardisation, visualisation and reporting.