Important Update

As of October 2020, MetaLab development has moved to a new repository: https://github.com/langcog/metalab

The new repository contains the history of this (metalab2) repository.

MetaLab

MetaLab is a suite of interactive tools for community-augmented meta-analysis, power analysis, and experimental planning in cognitive development research.

Building MetaLab Locally

For development purposes, you can build MetaLab (datasets, web site, and Shiny apps) locally.

Special Intructions for Windows Users

If you are building MetaLab on Windows, you must install the appropriate version of [Rtools] (https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/) before proceeding. Rtools will install the toolchain (compilers and linkers) necessary to build R packages from source code in the Windows environment.

Package Dependencies

If it is your first time running Metalab locally after cloning, or the package dependencies have been updated, you can install all the required R packages using

## install MetaLab package dependencies
renv::restore()

Developing the website and Shiny applications locally

## build and serve the MetaLab website on http://localhost:4321
source(here::here("scripts", "main_builder.R"))

## build and run, e.g., the visualization Shiny app
## (substitute "visualization" with any shiny app directory in ./shinyapps)
options(shiny.autoreload = TRUE)
shiny::runApp(here::here("shinyapps", "visualization")) 

Deploying the Shiny applications to staging environment

To deploy the Shiny applications to the staging environment, create a pull request to the master branch. This will build and deploy the Shiny applications to the staging environment. There is not currently a staging server for the website itself, only for the Shiny applications.

Note: The pull request cannot be initiated from a forked repostitory.

Deploying the website and Shiny applications to production environment

To deploy the website and Shiny applications to the production environment, merge the pull request you created in the step above. This will build and deploy both the website and the Shiny applications to the production environment.

Project Structure

Metadata

The metadata directory contains many list-type data that is used throughout the site. To change it, simply edit the corresponding file in the metadata directory and wait for the site to render again. Use these metadata files whenever you add or edit a dataset, a domain, a shiny app, a tutorial tab, a documentation tab, a person in the about page.

Adding new or editing documentation/tutorial/report tabs

Each tab in these three pages is an Rmd file under the documentation, tutorials, and reports directories, respectively. Simply add or edit an Rmd there. If you're adding a new tab or want to change the name of the tab, you need to edit the corresponding metadata file in the metadata directory.

Creating reports - no need to source dashboard/global.R

In the previous version of metalab, all Rmd reports had a line: source("../dashboard/global.R", chdir = TRUE). This is not needed, because the build script that renders the Rmd reports already has the code from that setup script, and its environment is accessible to the reports.

Shiny apps

To add a new shiny app or edit a shiny app, look in the shinyapps directory. Don't forget to edit the corresponding metadata file.

All current shiny apps use a common R file shinyapps/common/global.R.

Variables that are currently accessible from this file:

- project_directory - direct path to `metalab2` repository
- fields  
- fields_derived  
- datasets_file  
- datasets    
- cached_data  
- avg_month   
- all_data  
- studies   
- subjects   
- datasets  

Editing the other pages

The code for the other pages is in the pages/ directory.

Images

Save images in the pages/images directory in the correct subdirectory, and use that path in metadata files when referring to an image.