README.md

In davidsbutcher/durnit: Knit All Documents in a Directory

durnit

This R package provides a single function, durnit, which takes an input and an output directory as arguments. All Rmd files in the input directory (or its subdirectories) are knitted to the output directory using rmarkdown::render and the output format specified in each file’s YAML frontmatter. On subsequent runs only new or modified Rmd files are knitted.

Installation

Install the development (and only) version from GitHub:

remotes::install_github(davidsbutcher/durnit)

Usage

The package contains a single function, durnit, whose name is intended to evoke the phrase “directory knit”. It accepts two arguments, which specify the directory to search for Rmd files and the directory to save output to:

durnit(input_dir, output_dir)

All Rmd files in the input directory are rendered to the output directory using rmarkdown::render with the output format taken from the YAML frontmatter. Directory structure in the input directory is maintained, e.g. inputdir/notebook/June-2019/lcms.Rmd will be saved to outputdir/notebook/June-2019/lcms.html.

The output directory is also checked for a file called rmdsnapshot.rds containing information (time of last modification, MD5 sum, etc.) on any Rmd files already knitted using durnit. If it doesn’t exist, it is created. If it does exist, a new snapshot is compared to the existing one and only new or modified Rmd files are knitted. The new snapshot replaces the existing one.

Motivation

This function was originally designed to assist in the keeping of an electronic lab notebook as a collection of Rmd files, but could be useful for any collection of Rmd files which need to knitted without doing them one at a time. It is also optimized to allow it to be run regularly (e.g. using taskscheduleR) to keep the output documents up-to-date.

If you want the output document to contain the time it was last knitted, you can use the following code, which requires rprojroot:

format(file.info(rprojroot::thisfile_knit())$mtime, '%B %d, %Y')

## [1] "October 08, 2019"

To-Do List

• Make it possible to exclude directories by name
• Add option to not save an Rmd snapshot
• Provide the option to knit all Rmds to a single directory, i.e. do not maintain subdirectory structure
• Provide the option to delete all output files which do not correspond to a file in the new Rmd snapshot, e.g. deleted files
• Add option for parallel processing by integrating furrr functions

Dependencies

This package imports functions from purrr, magrittr, rmarkdown, and fs.

License

Creative Commons CC0

davidsbutcher/durnit documentation built on Dec. 18, 2019, 3:47 a.m.