Setup
What to do before Tuesday 16 June 2026
This page tells you exactly what to prepare before the workshop. Read through all three levels and do everything that applies to you.
Level 1 – Essential (5 minutes, do this at home)
Create a free GitHub account and verify your email address.
- Go to github.com and sign up with any email address you use regularly.
- GitHub will send you a verification email. Click the link in it before the day – this is important. Unverified accounts cannot push code or enable GitHub Pages, and verifying on conference wifi can be slow due to CAPTCHA checks.
- That is all. You do not need to do anything else at this stage.
If you already have a GitHub account, make sure your email address is verified (Settings → Emails).
Level 2 – Recommended for Track B (~30 minutes, do this at home)
Track B is the full-pipeline experience: local R, version control, and automatic publishing. If you want this, install the following before the day.
Software to install
| Software | Minimum version | Download |
|---|---|---|
| R | 4.4 | cran.r-project.org |
| Positron | latest | positron.posit.co |
| Quarto CLI | 1.5+ | quarto.org/docs/get-started/ |
| Git | 2.40+ | git-scm.com/downloads |
Install them in the order listed; Positron will detect R and Quarto automatically if they are already present.
Platform notes
Windows: Use the standard .exe installers for all four. When the Git installer asks about PATH, choose “Git from the command line and also from 3rd-party software”.
macOS: R and Quarto have .pkg installers. For Positron, use the .dmg. Install Git via git-scm.com or Homebrew (brew install git).
Linux: Use your distribution’s package manager for R and Git. Download Positron and Quarto from their respective sites.
Configure git with your name and email
Open a terminal (or the Positron terminal) and run these two commands, substituting your own details:
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "your@email.com"Use the same email address as your GitHub account.
Sign into GitHub from Positron
In Positron, open the Accounts menu (bottom-left of the window) and sign in with your GitHub account via browser OAuth. This handles authentication for cloning and pushing – no personal access tokens needed.
Test your setup
Run the check script from the template repository. In R (or the Positron console):
source("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CodeMoreh/replication-lab/main/R/check_setup.R")The script prints OK or FAIL for each requirement (R version, Quarto on PATH, Git on PATH, git user.name/email, required packages, network access to osf.io). Fix any FAILs before the day.
The template repository is at https://github.com/CodeMoreh/replication-lab.
R packages
The check script will install missing packages automatically if you allow it. The packages used in the workshop are: dplyr, readr, tidyr, ggplot2, broom, fixest, plm, sandwich, lmtest, dagitty, ggdag, modelsummary, haven, osfr. All are on CRAN.
Level 3 – Nothing installed? No problem
If you arrive without R, Positron, or Git installed, you can complete the full analytical exercise on Track A – the browser-only path.
Track A uses webR, which runs R entirely inside your browser. No installation, no account beyond GitHub, no admin rights needed on your machine. The Browser lab page has everything you need.
The only step that differs is the publishing step: instead of pushing from Positron, you will upload your saved script to a new GitHub repository via the web interface. The workshop will walk you through this (“first repo in 3 minutes”).
Optional pre-reading
These are not required, but if you want to arrive with context:
| Reading | Why | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Nosek et al. (2025) – A Brief Glossary of Terms about Repeatability | Pins down the vocabulary the workshop uses; 4 pages, genuinely brief | Essential if unfamiliar with the terminology |
| Aczel et al. (2026) – the Multi100 Nature paper | The study your workshop exercise is drawn from | Recommended |
| Auspurg & Brüderl (2021) – Reanalysing ‘Many Analysts, One Data Set’ | Short, open-access; explains why the estimand matters and why fixing it narrows the multiverse | Recommended |