pkgdown

pkgdown is designed to make it quick and easy to build a website for your package. You can see pkgdown in action at https://pkgdown.r-lib.org: this is the output of pkgdown applied to the latest version of pkgdown. Learn more in vignette("pkgdown") or ?build_site.

Installation

# Install release version from CRAN
install.packages("pkgdown")

# Install development version from GitHub
devtools::install_github("r-lib/pkgdown")

Usage

Get started with usethis:

# Run once to configure your package to use pkgdown
usethis::use_pkgdown()

Use pkgdown to update your website:

# Run to build the website
pkgdown::build_site()

This generates a docs/ directory containing a website. Your README.md becomes the homepage, documentation in man/ generates a function reference, and vignettes will be rendered into articles/. Read vignette("pkgdown") for more details and to learn how to customise your site.

If you are using GitHub, the easiest way to make this your package website is to check into git, then go to settings for your repo and make sure that the GitHub pages source is set to “gh-pages branch /(root) folder”. Be sure to update the URL on your github repository homepage so others can easily navigate to your new site.

In the wild

At last count, pkgdown is used by over 5,000 packages.

Here are a few examples created by contributors to pkgdown:

  • bayesplot (source): plotting functions for posterior analysis, model checking, and MCMC diagnostics.

  • valr (source): read and manipulate genome intervals and signals.

  • mkin (source): calculation routines based on the FOCUS Kinetics Report

  • NMF (source): a framework to perform non-negative matrix factorization (NMF).

Comparing the source and output of these sites is a great way to learn new pkgdown techniques.

Code of conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

License

Developers

Dev status

  • Lifecycle: maturing
  • CRAN Status
  • R build status
  • Codecov test coverage
  • R-CMD-check