Make your website with R Markdown in minutes

This is a template (and tutorial) for creating your website with R Markdown in minutes.

The official document from RStudio can be found here.

Procedure

Prerequisites

• Make sure that you have the latest versions of R, RStudio and package rmarkdown. I had problems of encoding because of that.

• Make sure that you have enabled Git in RStudio. More information can be found there.

• You need a GitHub account.

Make the first version of your website

• Fork this repo (top-right) and rename it to be 'YOURGITHUB.github.io' (in Settings of your brand new repo). Replace 'YOURGITHUB' by your GitHub username (case sensitive).

• Get the link from cloning the repo. Use the green button "Clone" and make sure you use SSH, not HTTPS. Then, go to RStudio, create a New Project > Version Control > Git and copy this link. You have cloned your new repo as an R project.

• Build the website by running rmarkdown::render_site(encoding = "UTF-8") or just Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + B.

• Commit and push all new files from RStudio. The first time you build the website, there is a full directory, site_libs/, that is created. Trying to add all the files from this directory to a commit can make RStudio freeze. If it happens, restart RStudio, and run rm .git/index.lock in the linux terminal of RStudio. Then run git add . in the terminal as well; this will add all the new files for you to commit (you can see all the added files in the Git panel after refreshing it).

• Go see your new website at https://YOURGITHUB.github.io/index.html.

Change the content of your website

• Modify _site.yml, index.Rmd, about.Rmd, cv.Rmd and CV.pdf with your own content.

• Build your website again. At any moment, you can preview your website locally, by rendering your site and viewing any of your local html file in your Web Browser.

• Commit and push everything from RStudio.

• Go see your new website with your own content at https://YOURGITHUB.github.io/.

The blog part

For now, the 'Blog' link is giving a 404 page.

If you want to add a static blog to your webpage, go there. If you don't, just remove the corresponding 3 lines from _site.yml.

Two examples

You can see for example

• my own website,

• the website of the R user group in Grenoble.

Conclusion

As a reminder, most credit goes to RStudio/Posit (thanks also to GitHub pages). I just made some minor modifications and made a tuto about how to use all this together.

If anything is not clear enough, feel free to open an issue in this repo. If it is an issue only related with R Markdown, you'll find a better answer posting your issue there.