Hopefully, there are bits of code below for tricky bits of R and other like programs I am using.

Shiny gist

Test gist

Yui’s scrape Rviews

github website gist

Background

gists are short code snippits that can be helpful to store and be able to access within R from remote computers and other peoples code. Now that github repositories have any free options to do this now. It is still a nice simple way to share code snippits that you have control over when they are accessed. What I mean is that within R it is possible to run the following commands:

This will result in a script being imported and run however if you remove or change the code the user running the above command will use the code attached to the gists.

How to convert files in github repo to a gist

First of all, note that Gist doesn’t support directories. To import a repository into a gist follow the next steps:

  1. Create a new gist and clone it locally (replace the dummy id with your Gist id):

    git clone git@gist.github.com:792bxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx9.git

  2. cd to that gist directory

  3. Pull and merge from your GitHub repository:

    git pull git@github.com:<user>/<repo>.git

  4. Push your changes

    git push

Again, note that if you have directories, you have to delete and commit them:

rm -rf some-directory
git commit -m 'Removed some-directory' .

Using the steps above, the project history will be kept. If you don’t care about history, you can always push files in your gist. Let’s say you have a repository containing multiple folders and you want for each folder to create a gist. You will repeat the next steps (or a script could do that):

git clone git@gist.github.com:<gist-id>.git
cd <gist-id>
cp ../path/to/your/github/repository/and/some/folder/* .
git add .
git commit -m 'Added the Gist files' .
git push

gist is different than how GitHub works:

gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are Git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable from Git.

However, if you try to push directories in gists you will get errors from remote:

$ git push
Counting objects: 32, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (21/21), done.
Writing objects: 100% (32/32), 7.35 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 32 (delta 10), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Gist does not support directories.
remote: These are the directories that are causing problems:
remote: foo
To git@gist.github.com:792.....0b79.git
 ! [remote rejected] master -> master (pre-receive hook declined)
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@gist.github.com:79.......9.git'