I read R-bloggers newsletter almost everyday. Although I enjoy reading other peoples’ blogs and seeing the cool things they do, I hadn’t really considered creating my own until I came across a post by David Robinson: Advice to aspiring data scientists: start a blog. This inspired me to set up my own blog. The following describes how I set up this site.

Getting Started:

All I knew at first was that I wanted create my posts using R Markdown files.

As with most things I don’t know how to do, I went to Google. A quick search for “how to setup an R blog” led me almost immediately to a December 2016 post by Dr. Shirin Glander’s: How to set up your own R blog with Github pages and Jekyll Bootstrap. I read through this article and some others on her site. I came across a newer post from September 2017: Moving my blog to blogdown. This was my starting point. I was going to use the R blogdown package in combination with Hugo and Netlify.

Like Shirin, I followed the blogdown ebook to setup my blog. It wasn’t as straight forward as I though and that’s why I chose to make my first post about my setup.

Installation:

I read through most of the blogdown ebook before I did anything just to get an idea of the steps I would need to take. I turned back to section 1.1 Installation to get started. I already had R and RStudio installed but I did not yet have the blogdown package so I installed it as well.

In RStudio:

install.packages("blogdown")

Next I installed Hugo which is a static site generator.

library(blogdown)
blogdown::install_hugo()

Knowing the version of Hugo installed will be important later. You can check the version via:

blogdown::hugo_version()
## [1] '0.59.1'

Github:

At this point I created a new repository on Github. In RStudio, I created a new project using Version Control (Git) and filled in the repository URL. I opened GitHub Desktop and added the repository from local path. The last step here was to click Publish.

Build the new site:

I did all this a couple times actually mostly just to try out different themes. I eventually settled on Thibaud Leprêtre’s tranquilpeak theme.

Back to RStudio. The next step was to build the new site with the chosen theme. Here is the code I used to build the new site with this theme:

blogdown::new_site(sample = FALSE, theme = "kakawait/hugo-tranquilpeak-theme", theme_example = FALSE)

I wanted to start with a clean slate so I chose not to install sample data or a theme_example. I committed the changes to Github and checked to make sure the new files were there.

Netlify:

Connecting the new site (Github repository) to Netlify was the next step. Because I wanted to start with no sample data, the content folder was empty to begin with. I found that my initial commit did not bring over the content directory. This caused an error when I attempted to deploy the new site on Netlify. To solve this I just added a .gitkeep file in the content directory and committed that change.

file.create("content/.gitkeep")

At Netlify, I logged in with my Github account. I clicked on “New site from Git.” to get started. Here I just followed the instructions from section 3.1 Netlify in the ebook. I selected the correct repository from Github and added “hugo” as the Build Command and “public” as the Publish Directory. Finally, I clicked on Advanced settings where I was able to create a new Build Environment Variable. I created “HUGO_VERSION” with the value 0.31.1 (which I found earlier). That’s it. I deployed the new site and it was up and running.

Initially you get a funny-looking url but you can easily change this under Site Settings. Click Change Site Name and choose a better name. I now had a live site accessible via .netlify.com.

Customer Domains:

I decided to go with a custom domain. In Netlify, also under Site Settings is a section for Domain Management where you can set the custom domain. I followed the Using a custom domain documentation to set DNS settings correctly.

Customizing my new site:

At this point there really wasn’t much of a site. I started following the User Documentation for the tranquilpeak theme.

Conclusion:

There are many combinations of tools and methods to setup a blog site and for each of those many different ways to get it accomplished. The steps above describe how I did it. It may not be the best way but it works and that’s what is important.