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 released 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()

Then use pkgdown to build your 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 deploy your site to GitHub pages.

pkgdown 2.0.0 and Bootstrap 5

pkgdown 2.0.0 includes an upgrade from Bootstrap 3 to Bootstrap 5, which is accompanied by a whole bunch of minor UI improvements. If you’ve heavily customised your site, there’s a small chance that this will break your site, so everyone needs to explicitly opt-in to the upgrade by adding the following to _pkgdown.yaml:

template:
  bootstrap: 5

Then learn about the many new ways to customise your site in vignette("customise").

In the wild

At last count, pkgdown is used by over 6,000 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