Building a Personal Website with Blogdown and Github Pages

• Build your Entire Site in RStudio
  • Not Just for Blogs, Projects too!
• Easier to Incorporate RMarkdown in Blog Posts
• Hugo Doesn't Require Ruby/Other Dependencies

• Create Two Repos on Github
  • You could use one repo with a subbranch
• Repo 1: <yourusername>.github.io
  • This is where your site will be built
  • Must be named in this format
• Repo 2: blog (or whatever you want to call it)
  • This is for the source code to build your site
• Create Two Local Folders and Clone Your Repos
  • Delete README.md if it exists

# Install blogdown package
devtools::install_github('rstudio/blogdown')

# Load blogdown package and install Hugo
library(blogdown)
install_hugo()

# Change working directory to where you will build your site(s)
setwd("~/Documents/Github")

# Create new site in the cloned blog repository
new_site(dir = 'blog', # Local repo folder name
         theme = 'kakawait/hugo-tranquilpeak-theme',
         format = 'toml') # 'toml' or 'yaml'

# Change working directory to 'root' folder of site in order to serve site/write new posts
setwd("~/Documents/Github/blog")

# Rebuild and preview the website
serve_site()

After calling serve_site(), go to localhost:4321 in browser

This file is the backbone of your site, where most options are set

Some of the important options:

• baseurl = "https://<yourusername>.github.io/"
• theme = "hugo-tranquilpeak-theme"
  • (replace with your theme name)
• publishDir = "../<yourusername>.github.io"
  • This is the path to your other local repo .github.io
  • This will hold your site's published content, which you push to Github

In RStudio: build_site()

In Terminal:

• cd ~/Documents/Github/<yourusername>.github.io
• git add .
• git commit -m "building site with blogdown"
• git push origin master

Open <yourusername>.github.io in your browser

• Blogdown Documentation
  • https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/
• Two-Repo Tutorial
  • https://tclavelle.github.io/blog/blogdown_github/
• Repo with Subbranch Tutorial
  • https://proquestionasker.github.io/blog/Making_Site/
• Hugo Themes
  • http://themes.gohugo.io/

Email: josephcarl7@gmail.com

Github: josephcarl

LinkedIn: joseph-carl