The Carpentries Workbench

An accessible lesson infrastructure built in R

Workbench Beta Phase

We are testing use of The Workbench on a small number of official lessons.
Learn more about how to participate in the Beta Phase.

The Workbench is a complete redesign of The Carpentries lesson websites, with new features prioritising accessibility and navigation. All Carpentries lessons will begin using The Carpentries Workbench in May 2023.

three isometric hex badges for The Carpentries Workbench representing the packages sandpaper, pegboard, and varnish. Each badge is styled to look like a tiny workshop working on a wooden carpentries logo with the package namesake highlighted.

screenshot of the 'Navigating the Filesystem' episode of the Library Carpentry Shell lesson screenshot of the 'Introduction to R' episode of the Library Carpentry R for Social Scientists lesson screenshot of the 'Navigating Files and Directories' episode of the Software Carpentry Shell lesson screenshot of the 'Building Skill with Practice' episode of the Instructor Training lesson

Resources

Installation

To install the workbench, make sure you have a working version of R and pandoc/RStudio installed (see the workbench setup instructions for details).

From there, you can install the workbench packages and their dependencies from our Carpentries R Universe:

install.packages(c("sandpaper", "varnish", "pegboard", "tinkr"),
  repos = c("https://carpentries.r-universe.dev/", getOption("repos")))

Updating

To update workbench packages, you can use the same command as you did to install your packages:

install.packages(c("sandpaper", "varnish", "pegboard", "tinkr"),
  repos = c("https://carpentries.r-universe.dev/", getOption("repos")))

Guides

Tools

Templates

Inspired Examples

These are examples of lessons developed with The Workbench since the initial announcement: