TLDR;

1. Open in Gitpod and wait for the workspace to come up.
2. Start Rstudio in the terminal with rserver.

1. Go to https://gitpod.io/login/ and sign up with your Github account. The Starter package which provides 50 hours per month.
2. Go to https://gitpod.io/new/#https://github.com/joejcollins/melody-angel to set up the development container.
3. Accept the standard size workspace, this is usually sufficient.
4. The Python and R packages will also be downloaded and installed. The process takes about 10 minutes in total.
5. Ignore the message from VS Code to install R package {languageserver} this is installed by setup.R.
6. Do install the recommended extensions for this repository.
7. Open a terminal and enter the command rserver. Thi should open R studio in a browser window.
8. In Rstudio got to File > Open Project... and open the project file melody-angel.Rproj.
9. Do R stuff.

Upon using the "plot" function in RStudio, this error may appear:

Warning message:
In grSoftVersion() :
  unable to load shared object '/usr/local/lib/R/modules//R_X11.so':
  libXt.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is harmless and the plot function still works. The error is caused by the way the container was built.