In Paradigm4/pkgdown: Make Static HTML Documentation for a Package

The goal of pkgdown is to make it easy to make an elegant and useful package website with a minimum of work. You can get a basic website up and running in just a couple of minutes:

# Run once to configure package to use pkgdown
usethis::use_pkgdown()
# Run to build the website
pkgdown::build_site()

While you'll get a decent website without any additional work, if you want a website that really pops, you'll need to read the rest of this vignette. It works through the main components of a pkgdown website:

Metadata
Home page
Function reference
Articles
News

Metadata

You can override pkgdown's defaults with a YAML file called _pkgdown.yml[^other-locations]. Options that affect the entire site are documented in build_site() and include:

A bootswatch theme that affects the overall appearance of the whole site.

yaml template: params: bootswatch: cerulean
A Google analytics user ID if you want to track the people who are using your site

yaml template: params: ganalytics: UA-000000-01
Customize metadata used for social media cards, as described in vignette("metadata").
Package search, as described in vignette("search").

[^other-locations]: You can also put it in pkgdown/_pkgdown.yml if you want to keep the package root clutter free, or in inst/_pkgdown.yml if you want to make it available when your package is installed.

Home page

The contents of home page is automatically generated from index.md or README.md. pkgdown tries them in order, so if you want a different display for GitHub and pkgdown, you can provide both files. The homepage also includes a sidebar full of useful links; see ?build_home for how these are generated and how you can customise them.

Reference

pkgdown creates a function reference in reference/ that includes one page for each .Rd help topic in man/. The translation of individual help topics from Rd to HTML is generally straightforward, but there are a couple of things you should bear in mind:

pkgdown does its best to autolink all references to help topics and articles described in vignette("linking").
pkgdown executes all examples, inserting the rendered results in the generated HTML files.

By default, pkgdown generates a reference index that is just an alphabetically-ordered list of functions. The index is much more useful with human curation because functions can be grouped and described in categories. To override the default, provide a reference field in _pkgdown.yml. The reference should be an array of three types objects:

A title, defined by title and optional desc (description) fields.
A subtitle, defined by subtitle and optional desc (description) fields.
A list of topics defined by a contents field.

reference:
- title: "Connecting to Spark"
  desc: >
    Functions for installing Spark components and managing
    connections to Spark
- contents: 
  - spark_config
  - spark_connect
  - spark_disconnect
  - spark_install
  - spark_log
- title: "Reading and Writing Data"
  desc: "Functions for reading and writing Spark DataFrames."
- contents:
  - starts_with("spark_read")
  - starts_with("spark_write")
  - matches("saveload")

Note the use of starts_with() to select all functions with a common prefix. You can also use ends_with() and matches(). See complete details in ?build_reference.

While working on the reference index you might want to run build_reference_index() instead of build_site(); that will considerably reduce your iteration time.

Articles

pkgdown will automatically build all vignettes found in vignettes, translating them to HTML files in articles/. Due to the way that pkgdown has to integrate RMarkdown generated HTML with its own HTML, relatively little control is available over the output format.

If you want to include an article on the website but not in the package (e.g., because it's large), you can either place it in a subdirectory of vignettes/ or add it to .Rbuildignore (and make sure that there's no vignettes: section in the yaml header). In the extreme case where you want to produce only articles but not vignettes, you should add the complete vignettes/ directory to .Rbuildignore and ensure that DESCRIPTION does not have a VignetteBuilder field.

More details can be found in ?build_articles.

News

If NEWS.md is present, it will be rendered into a single-page Changelog based on markdown level headings. pkgdown assumes your NEWS.md is formatted using level one headings (#) to specify package name and version number, and level two headings (##) to provide topical organization for each release.

# pkgdown 1.1.0

## Bug Fixes

* Lots of them

# pkgdown 1.0.0

* This is the first release of pkgdown.

See more suggestions for writing news bullets in the tidyverse style guide.

See ?build_news for more customisation options including how to:

Create one page for each major version and related minor versions.
Add release announcements to the news navbar drop-down.

Publishing

The easiest way to publish your website is to use GitHub docs/ directory support. If you want to build and publish your package automatically with GitHub actions, try usethis::use_github_action("pkgdown").

Promoting

Once your finalized site is built and published on the web, you should publicize its URL in a few places:

The URL field of your package DESCRIPTION, alongside a link to its source:

URL: https://pkgdown.r-lib.org, https://github.com/r-lib/pkgdown
Your repository description on GitHub.
On Twitter (make sure to include #rstats).