Getting the Blogdown Package

Aquiring the blogdown package is as simple as aquiring any R package install.packages(“blogdown”). You will be asked if you want to install Hugo, say yes because hugo is important. One thing of note is that installing blogdown will give a shiny new ‘addins’ button with many of the blogdown function (serve site, new post, etc) that you can use as an alternative to running commands.

#code used:
install.packages("blogdown")

Creating a Local Site

Once blogdown is installed we’re going to make a new R studio project. When starting the project in a new/existing directory under ‘project type’ you’ll be able to select ‘website using blogdown’. When the project files are created it’ll come with a config.toml file that you can make changes to to customize your site.j

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This demo site is what we’ll be launching to the internet (I’ll explain in another page how to add content and such). We’re also going to need this package loaded so library() from the terminal. But when we made the site nothing happened, we have to serve the site, with blogdown::serve_site() which can be done from the addin menu or console. This will open up the site for us to explore in the file viewer (I increased the size of my viewer for visibility). Right now it just has a couple of demo posts but I’m sure you have some great ideas of how you can add to that. Right now the site only exists on our computer so we’ve got some work to do before it can be seen by everyone.

library(blogdown)
blogdown::serve_site()

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Have Github

For this step you’ll be going to https://github.com/ and making an acount with them. This is how we’ll be getting the site files off of your computer and accessible to the internet (for netlify)

Upload Your Site to Github

Now according to most of the tutorials I looked at this is supposed to be a pretty simple process. However they seem to have left out some steps that caused me problems. I will be mentioning these problems as well as how I managed to evenually kill the problems.

Our first step is to get your existing local site onto github by making a new empty repository on github (you don’t need a readme or gitignore to start). When you create a new repository there’s no need to adjust options beyond the name. After creating the repository it brings to several options such as “quick setup”, “creating the new repository on the command line”, “pushing an existing repository from the command line”, or “importing code from another repository”. The option that we will care about is creating the new repository on the command line. It may be convienent for you to copy/paste the code shown on github into a safe notepad or similar location.

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Using this code will require us to be on the command line though. You can get there from the start menu and typing ‘cmd’ into the search bar (unsure of directions on non-windows). This is where I ran into my first real problem in that the code shown on github wouldn’t run. If you, like me are getting an error along the lines of “git command does not exist” then your computer does not have git installed (easy test is typing “git init” into the command line). That’s ok though, we can fix it! The steps to getting this working are: 1) download and install git; 2) add git to the computers PATH variables.

#rememeber that despite this showing up as R code its going on the command line
#these user specific paths would also be made for you if you have the code from 
cd the_path_to_your_project_folder #eg C:\Users\matth\Dropbox\R Working Directory\Demo Site
echo "# [repositoryname]" >> README.md #eg # Demo-Site
git init
git add README.md #this will add a readme file. you'll only need to add this once
git add .  #####the period indicates everything in the folder
git commit -m "first commit" #the quotes can be anything and are what you're calling this particular commit. its useful to keep it organized
git remote add origin {url for the repository} #eg https://github.com/username/Demo-Site.git 
git push -u origin master

Have Netlify

For this step you’ll be going to www.netlify.com and making an account with them. This is how we’ll be deploying our website.

Build Netlify Site Deploying From Github

We’re in the home stretch. This part is largely pushing buttons so here’s the list of buttons after you’ve got your account.

• Sites tab
• new site from git
• github as the git provider
• authorize netlify into your github
• select the repository you’ve made for your website (the one you were committing files to earlier)
• ‘show advanced’ build settings
• new variable
• Key: HUGO_VERSION
• Value: 0.53 (value depends on theme used)

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You’ll be taken to a new page saying that the deployment of your website is happening. This is it. Your site is being birthed onto the internet. Assuming the deploy works you’ll be able to click on the link for your site which will be something like https://nonsense-numbers.netlify.app and you’ll be able to see your website on the internet. Check from your phone, its really cool to be able to see the fruit of what you did.

Now if you don’t want random giberish as your website url you can fix it (without purchasing a custom domain). We got some more buttons:

• start on the overview tab of your brand new shiny website (this is also where netlify drops you after making the site)
• site settings
• Under site details, then under site information -> “change site name”
• Cange it to whatever you want. It’ll still end in ‘.netlify.app’ though

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And that’s it. You’re done!

Resources

This is a bonus section and has a bunch of resources and tutorials on blogdown in case people don’t find this site helpful. If you find that I missed something please let me know.