Description

build_site() is a convenient wrapper around six functions:

• init_site()

• build_home()

• build_reference()

• build_articles()

• build_tutorials()

• build_news()

See the documentation for the each function to learn how to control that aspect of the site.

Note if names of generated files were changed, you will need to use clean_site() first to clean up orphan files.

Usage

Arguments

YAML config

There are five top-level YAML settings that affect the entire site: destination, url, title, template, and navbar.

destination controls where the site will be generated. It defaults to docs/ (for GitHub pages), but you can override if desired. Relative paths will be taken relative to the package root.

url optionally specifies the url where the site will be published. Supplying this will:

• Allow other pkgdown sites to link to your site when needed, rather than using generic links to https://rdrr.io. See vignette("linking") for more information.

• Generate a sitemap.xml, increasing the searchability of your site.

• Automatically generate a CNAME when deploying to github.

title overrides the default site title, which is the package name. It's used in the page title and default navbar.

You can also provided information to override the default display of the authors. Provided a list named with the name of each author, including href to add a link, or html to override the text:

Development mode

The development mode of a site controls four main things:

• Where the site is built.

• The colour of the package version in the navbar.

• The optional tooltip associated with the version.

• The indexing of the site by search engines.

There are currently three possible development modes:

• release: site written to docs/, the version gets the default colouring, and no message.

• development: written to docs/dev/, the version gets a danger label, and message stating these are docs for an in-development version of the package. The noindex meta tag is used to ensure that these packages are not indexed by search engines.

• unreleased: the package is written to docs/, the version gets a "danger" label, and the message indicates the package is not yet on CRAN.

The default development mode is "release". You can override it by adding a new development field to _pkgdown.yml, e.g.

You can also have pkgdown automatically detect the mode with:

The mode will be automatically determined based on the version number:

• 0.0.0.9000 (0.0.0.*): unreleased

• four version components: development

• everything else -> release

There are three other options that you can control:

destination allows you to override the default subdirectory used for the development site; it defaults to dev/. version_label allows you to override the style used for development (and unreleased) versions of the package. It defaults to "danger", but you can set to "default", "info", or "warning" instead. (The precise colours are determined by your bootstrap theme, but become progressively more eye catching as you go from default to danger). Finally, you can choose to override the default tooltip with version_tooltip.

YAML config - navbar

By default, the top navigation bar (the "navbar") will contain links to:

• The home page, with a "home" icon.

• "Get Started", if you have an article with the same name as the package (e.g., vignettes/pkgdown.Rmd).

• Reference

• Articles (i.e., vignettes, if present).

• News (if present).

• A "github" icon with a link to your github repo (if listed in the DESCRIPTION url field).

You can override these defaults with the navbar field. It has two primary components: structure and components. These components interact in a somewhat complicated way, but the complexity allows you to make minor tweaks to part of the navbar while relying on pkgdown to automatically generate the rest.

The structure defines the layout of the navbar, i.e. the order of the components, and whether they're right aligned or left aligned. You can use this component to change the order of the default components, and to add your own components.

The components describes the appearance of each element in the navbar. It uses the same syntax as RMarkdown. The following YAML snippet illustrates some of the most important features.

Components can contain sub-menus with headings (indicated by missing href) and separators (indicated by a bunch of -). You can also use icons from fontawesome.

This yaml would override the default "articles" component, eliminate the "home" component, and add a new "twitter" component. Unless you explicitly mention new components in the structure they'll be added to the far right of the left menu.

YAML config - search

You can use docsearch by algolia to add search to your site.

You also need to add a url: field, see above.

YAML config - template

You can get complete control over the appearance of the site using the template component. There are two components to the template: the HTML templates used to layout each page, and the css/js assets used to render the page in the browser.

The easiest way to tweak the default style is to use a bootswatch template, by passing on the bootswatch template parameter to the built-in template:

See a complete list of themes and preview how they look at https://gallery.shinyapps.io/117-shinythemes/:

Optionally provide the ganalytics template parameter to enable Google Analytics. It should correspond to your tracking id.

When enabling Google Analytics, be aware of the type and amount of user information that you are collecting. You may wish to limit the extent of data collection or to add a privacy disclosure to your site, in keeping with current laws and regulations.

Suppress indexing of your pages by web robots by setting noindex: true:

You can also override the default templates and provide additional assets. You can do so by either storing in a package with directories inst/pkgdown/assets and inst/pkgdown/templates, or by supplying path and asset_path. To suppress inclusion of the default assets, set default_assets to false.

These settings are currently recommended for advanced users only. There is little documentation, and you'll need to read the existing source for pkgdown templates to ensure that you use the correct components.

YAML config - repo

pkgdown automatically generates links to the source repository in a few places

• Articles and documentation topics are linked back to the underlying source file.

• The NEWS automatically links issue numbers and user names.

• The homepage provides a link to "Browse source code"

pkgdown automatically figures out the necessary URLs if you link to a GitHub or GitLab repo in your BugReports or URL field. Otherwise, you can supply your own in the repo component:

• home: path to package home on source code repository.

• source:: path to source of individual file in master branch.

• issue: path to individual issue.

• user: path to user.

The varying components (e.g. path, issue number, user name) are pasted on the end of these URLs so they should have trailing /s.

pkgdown defaults to using the "master" branch for source file URLs. This can be configured to use a specific branch when linking to source files by specifying a branch name:

YAML config - deploy

deploy currently offers a single parameter:

• install_metadata allows you to install package index metadata into the package itself. Normally this metadata is made available on the published site; installing it into your package means that it's available for autolinking even if your website is not reachable at build time (e.g. because it's only behind the firewall or requires auth).

  deploy:
    install_metadata: true
  

Options

Users with limited internet connectivity can disable CRAN checks by setting options(pkgdown.internet = FALSE). This will also disable some features from pkgdown that requires an internet connectivity. However, if it is used to build docs for a package that requires internet connectivity in examples or vignettes, this connection is required as this option won't apply on them.

Users can set a timeout for build_site(new_process = TRUE) with options(pkgdown.timeout = Inf), which is useful to prevent stalled builds from hanging in cron jobs.

Examples