Set Up Your Working Directory

As you learned in the previous tutorial, project organization is integral to efficient research. In this tutorial, you will create the project directory that you will use for all of your work. This project directory will be carefully organized with a \data directory that you will use to save all of the data you use in your lessons.

Create earth-analytics Project Directory

Now that you have the basics of good project structure out of the way, let’s get your project set up. You are going to create an earth-analytics project directory (or folder) where you will store data and files used in the class. You will then set that project directory as your working directory in R.

Data Tip: Directory vs Folder: You can think of a directory as a folder. However the term directory considers the relationship between that folder and the folders within it and around it (it’s full path).

Follow the steps below to create an earth-analytics project directory on your computer and then a data directory located within that project directory.

• Navigate to the Documents directory on your computer.
• In the directory, create a NEW DIRECTORY called earth-analytics.

Data Tip: Notice that you are creating an easy to read directory name. The name has no spaces and uses all lower case to support machine reading down the road. Sometimes this format of naming using dashes is referred to as a slug.

• Next, open the earth-analytics directory and create a directory within it called data

You will use the data directory to store the data that you download to use in this course and in the tutorials hosted on this website.

• The final step is optional but recommended - especially if you are new to R and RStudio. Open up RStudio and set your default working directory to the earth-analytics directory that you just created. In RStudio go to: Tools –> Global Options –> Click on the General setting at the top of the global options panel` (see screen shot below).
• Browse to the earth-analytics directory and set it as your default working directory.

When you set a default working directory, every time you open RStudio it will default to that working directory being set. This can be nice if you are going to always work in the same directory (like you will in all tutorials).

Finally, let’s see what your main working directory looks like. Use the getwd() function to find out what your current working directory is in R.

# view working directory
getwd()

[1] "/Users/lewa8222/Documents/earth-analytics"

If your working directory path does not match the location where you created your earth-analytics directory on your computer, then you need to fix it. You can set the working directory with R code OR you can use the RStudio interface to set the working directory.

Set Working Directory in RStudio Interface

Let’s set the working directory using the RStudio interface.

• In the RStudio interface, look at the pane in the LOWER LEFT hand corner of your screen. It should have a tab called Files which opens the files window. In the files window, navigate to your earth-analytics directory which should be within the Documents directory.

Your window should look like the screen shot below:

• Next, click on the More drop down. Choose Set as working directory

Set Working Directory Using Code

You can set the working directory using code in R too. You don’t have to do this if you already set the working directory above. However, it’s good to know how to do it - particularly if you get into more advanced scripting in R. You use the setwd() function to set a new working directory as follows:

# set working directory - MAC File Structure - backslashes
setwd("/Users/lewa8222/Documents/earth-analytics")

# a windows machine uses front slashes. There is normally a
# drive letter like C:\
setwd("C:\Users\lewa8222\Documents\earth-analytics")

All Done!

Great work! You are now ready to start working with RStudio!