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Repository Structure

A course repository is used by DataCamp's build process to generate the views your students will interact with. Depending on the technology you chose when creating the course (R, Python, SQL, or Shell) the repository's structure can slightly differ. In general, the repository contains:

|- datasets/
|- .gitignore
|- README.md
|- chapter1.md
|- chapter2.md
|- ...
|- chapterN.md
|- course.yml
|- requirements.r
|- requirements.sh
|- scripts
|  |- ch1_1_script.md
|  |- ch1_2_script.md
|- slides
|  |- ch1_1_slides.md
|  |- ch1_2_slides.md

An overview of what each of this does is:

File/Folder Description
datasets/* Contains all datasets you may want to use in your course (e.g., CSV files)
scripts/* Contains all the narrative for the course's slides and videos
slides/* Contains the Markdown slides for your course's videos
.gitignore Specifies files and folders that Git should ignore
README.md The Markdown file used as the course's home page on GitHub
chapterX.md A Markdown file containing metadata and exercises for one chapter
course.yml A YAML file with course metadata
requirements.r An R script to install additional R packages used in your course
requirements.sh A shell script to install other packages used in your course

The sections below describe some of these files and folders in more detail.

course.yml

This file contains general information about your course:

Property Status Description
title required Title of the course
description required Description of the course
programming_language required Technology of the course (r, python, sql, or shell)
time_needed optional Time needed to finish the course, e.g., "4 hours"
difficulty_level required 1 = beginner, 2 = intermediate, 3 = advanced
practice_pool_id optional The ID of the challenges connected to the course
prerequisites optional A YAML list of course IDs of this course's prerequisites
datasets optional YAML key-value pairs that define the datasets used in this course
from required Reserved for DataCamp use

In more detail:

  • prerequisites is a list of course IDs specifying the prerequisite for the course, such as:
prerequisites:
  - 58 # Introduction to R
  - 672 # Intermediate R
  • datasets uses filenames as keys and the human-readable titles of datasets as values to be shown on the course page. If the value is __IGNORE__ the dataset won't be shown on the course page:
datasets:
  some_data.RData: Super nice dataset
  some_image.jpg: Some image
  r_script_i_need.R: __IGNORE__ # This file won't be shown on the course page

info::Note

to make your life easier, an automated system will add the datasets in your datasets directory to your course.yml file. The system will try to generate a humanized string; you can change it afterwards (or set it to __IGNORE__ if you don't want this dataset displayed). You can trigger regeneration of this dataset listing by clicking the button on the build status block in the Home tab of your course.

chapterX.(R)md

A course is organized into chapters, each of which contains several exercises. Chapter files must be called chapter1.md, chapter2.md, and so on, and must start with a YAML header inside triple-dashed lines containing information about the chapter:

---
title : Introduction to Basics
title_meta: Chapter 1
description: In this chapter, you will take your first steps with R.
---

Chapter Fields

Each chapter file contains general information about the chapter in YAML format such as:

Property Status Description
title required Chapter title
description required Brief description of the chapter
free_preview optional (For premium courses) whether this chapter can be previewed for free
attachments optional Attachments for the chapter (explained below)

The attachments key allows you to specify extra files associated with the chapter. Currently this is only used used to specify the slides for the chapter using the slide_link sub-key, like this:

attachments:
  slides_link: http://link.to.slides/

The .md extension for chapter files is supported for all languages. You can also use the .Rmd extension for chapters of R courses to provide R-specific Markdown flavor and syntax on GitHub.

requirements.r

This file describes all the R dependencies or packages your course requires, such as:

devtools::install_version("ggplot2", "2.2.1")
devtools::install_version("data.table", "1.10.0")

This file is only present for R courses.

requirements.sh

This shell script installs the dependencies or packages needed for Python, SQL, or Shell courses, such as:

pip3 install numpy==1.12.0
pip3 install pandas==0.19.2
pip3 install dccpu==0.3.7

info:Note

requirements.sh file is sometimes present in repositories for R courses when there is a need to install system-level dependencies (e.g., libcurl)