RapidBook

This is a template, created with the purpose of quickly creating, customizing and deploying a Book-like website using the Bookdown R package, to be hosted on Github Pages.

You can view the currently deployed template here.

Instructions 📋

Follow these instructions to either use, deploy or customize the template:

Copy this template

• 1. Click the green "Use this template" button above. DO NOT FORK THE REPO if you intend to use this as a template. Choose a descriptive name for your repo depending on what you intend to do.

Deploy with GitHub Pages 🚀

• 1. On the home page of your repo, click Settings. Scroll down to the GitHub pages section and change Source to master branch /docs folder. Above the Source line, a bar will appear with your book's URL. The bar will initially be blue and indicate that your book is ready to be published and will change to green once it is published. Copy the URL. (Note that sometimes there is a delay until your book actually appears at that URL. If it doesn't appear after a few minutes, make a change and commit it to trigger a GitHub Pages build.)

• 2. Click the gear button near "About" on the home page of the repo and paste your book URL into the Website field that appears on the right.

Clone your repo

• 1. Clone your new repo with File, New Project..., Version Control, Git in RStudio.

Edit some key files

• 1. In index.Rmd, enter the TITLE of your book in the title: key.

• 2. In index.Rmd, enter your NAME in the author: key.

• 3. In index.Rmd enter your github repository in the github-repo key.

• 3. In index.Rmd enter the current url of the website as the url key, once deployed to Github Pages.

• 5. In index.Rmd enter the description of your project.

• 6. In _bookdown.yml, change YOUR GITHUB USERNAME to your GitHub username in the two places it appears.

• 7. In _bookdown.yml, change YOUR GITHUB REPO to your GitHub repo name in the two places it appears.

• [] 8. In _output.yml, specify the name of your default branch, which is usually either main or master. In this template it defaults to master.

(Note that 6. and 7. provide links to the .Rmd files of your project for editing and viewing. If you move your .Rmd files you will need to update these file paths. Once your book is rendered, test that the edit (pen) and view (eye) buttons work.)

• 5. In _output.yml, change YOUR SHORT TITLE to a shortened version of your title. (Leave the "after:" line indicating that the book was published with bookdown as is.)

Customize this template 🎇

You can easily customize the theme and fonts of the book, in the _output.yml file:

• Primary Color: set your color in hexadecimal format, in the primary key, which is by default set to Purple (#4E11A8).
• Base Font: set the base font of the website, in the base_font key, which is by default set to Lato.
• Heading Font: set the heading font of the website, in the heading_font key, which is by default set to Poppins.
• Code Font: set the code font of the website, in the code_font key, which is by default set to DM Mono.

Render the book

• 1. Install bookdown with install.packages("bookdown"). If you already have it, update to the latest version.

• 2. Render locally with bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd").

• 3. Use browseURL("docs/index.html") to view your book locally (or just open index.html in a browser).

• 4. If it looks good, commit and push all changed files to GitHub.

(You will need to repeat steps 2 and 4 every time you wish to update the book online.)

Additional features

Consult the official guide to bookdown: https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown