Introduction to pkgdown

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. If you’re using GitHub, we recommend setting up pkgdown and GitHub actions to automatically build and publish your site:

# Run this once to publish your site regularly
usethis::use_pkgdown_github_pages()

If you are not using GitHub, you will have to run pkgdown::build_site() manually everytime you want to update the site.

# Run once
# Remove docs/ from gitignore to ensure it is checked into git.
usethis::use_pkgdown()
# Run everytime you want to update your site
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 starts by showing you how to configure pkgdown with a _pkgdown.yml. You’ll learn about the main components of the site (the home page, reference, articles, and news), and then how to publish and promote your site.

Metadata

You can override pkgdown’s defaults with a YAML file called _pkgdown.yml1. The most important field is url, which gives the final location of the site:

url: https://pkgdown.r-lib.org

url is used throughout the site to generate absolute urls where they are needed. url is also part of what enables auto-links to your help topics or vignettes from sites external to your package, such as from other pkgdown sites or from Quarto websites. See vignette("linking") for more.

Another important option is template, which allows you to control the overall appearance of your site:

template:
  bootstrap: 5
  bootswatch: cerulean

You can learn more about controlling the appearance of your site in vignette("customise").

Accessibility

pkgdown’s defaults work to ensure that your site is accessible to as many people as possible. But there are some accessibilty issues that only a human can solve, so make sure to also read vignette("accessibility") to learn about them.

Home page

The contents of the home page are automatically generated from index.md or README.md. pkgdown tries to put them in order, so it’s possible to have a different display on GitHub and pkgdown by providing 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:

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.

Each entry in reference can take one of three forms:

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, including other topic matching helper functions.

While iterating on the reference index you might want to run pkgdown::build_reference_index(). It just re-builds the index page, making it faster to quickly change _pkgdown.yml and see how it affects your site.

Articles

pkgdown will automatically build all vignettes found in vignettes/, translating them to HTML files in articles/. It is recommended to name your intro article with your package name to generate a “Get Started” page automatically.

Due to the way that pkgdown has to integrate R Markdown generated HTML with its own HTML, relatively little control is available over the output format. You can see the details in ?build_articles.

If you want to include an article on the website but not in the package (e.g., because it’s large), you can use usethis::use_article() to set it up.

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:

Publishing

If you use GitHub, the easiest way to build and publish your site is via GitHub actions. Using GitHub actions automatically builds and publishes the site every time you make a change. The easiest way to set this up is to run usethis::use_pkgdown_github_pages(), and if you need to customize the action, see README.md r-lib/actions.

Promoting

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

  1. 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

    (usethis::use_pkgdown_github_pages() does this for you.)

  2. Your repository description on GitHub.

    (usethis::use_pkgdown_github_pages() does this for you.)

  3. On social media (make sure to include #rstats).

  1. 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. You can also use .yaml as the extension if desired.↩︎