This is a template for creating an HTML GitBook style bookdown book, hosted on GitHub Pages. It is based on the one created with File, New Project…, New Directory, Book Project using bookdown in RStudio. It assumes you know how to use git/GitHub and R Markdown, and have some familiarity with the bookdown package. If you don’t, the package author Yihue Xie’s RStudio webinar Introduction to Bookdown (R Package) provides an excellent introduction. In addition, check out bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown, also by Yihui Xie, both for the content and the format–it is itself a bookdown book.
Follow these instructions and you will have a published bookdown book in less than five minutes. If you have any difficulties or have feedback of any kind, please file an issue.
1. On the home page of your repo, click Settings. Scroll down to the GitHub pages section and change Source to master branch /docs folder. Above the Source line, a bar will appear with your book’s URL. The bar will initially be blue and indicate that your book is ready to be published and will change to green once it is published. Copy the URL. (Note that sometimes there is a delay until your book actually appears at that URL. If it doesn’t appear after a few minutes, make a change and commit it to trigger a GitHub Pages build.)
2. Click the gear button near “About” on the home page of the repo and paste your book URL into the Website field that appears on the right.
1. In index.Rmd, change YOUR TITLE HERE to your title.
2. In index.Rmd, change YOUR NAME HERE to your name.
3. In _bookdown.yml, change YOUR GITHUB USERNAME to your GitHub username in the two places it appears.
4. In _bookdown.yml, change YOUR GITHUB REPO to your GitHub repo name in the two places it appears.
(Note that 3. and 4. provide links to the .Rmd files of your project for editing and viewing. If you move your .Rmd files you will need to update these file paths. Once your book is rendered, test that the edit (pen) and view (eye) buttons work.)
_output.yml, change YOUR SHORT TITLE to a shortened version of your title. (Leave the “after:” line indicating that the book was published with bookdown as is.)1. Install bookdown with install.packages("bookdown"). If you already have it, update to the latest version.
2. Render locally with bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd").
3. Use browseURL("docs/index.html") to view your book locally (or just open index.html in a browser).
4. If it looks good, commit and push all changed files to GitHub.
(You will need to repeat steps 2 and 4 every time you wish to update the book online.)
Once you’ve completed these steps, delete the content of this README and add a short description of your project with a link to the book URL. It would be appreciated if you add the following to the end:
This repo was initially generated from a bookdown template available here: https://github.com/jtr13/bookdown-template.
(And starring the repo would be nice too so I can see if this is getting used or not!)
A demo video showing how to create a bookdown book following these instructions: http://bit.ly/fiveminutebookdown
Please consult the official guide to bookdown: https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown