As I previously expressed, I grew annoyed at having to build the book every time I was changing something minor (or major but that is more understandable). I tried using Wowchemy’s project template to rewrite everything, but there were issues with equation-rendering.

I then fell upon Emil Hvitfeldt “Deploy your bookdown project to Netlify with GitHub Actions” post, which did not need Jekyll: I tried it out with the bookdown demonstration book, then with my own and it worked out quite nicely.

I have some points to raise about the whole process:

  • I properly identified myself for the usethis package (in particular, regarding the Personal Access Token thingy),
  • I added a DESCRIPTION file: usethis::use_description(check_name = FALSE),
  • I removed the output folder docs (necessary for GitHub pages) in the _bookdown.yaml file,
  • In the bookdown demonstration book, we can find .travis.yml, Dockerfile, _build.sh and _deploy.sh. These files are not needed here.
  • renv::snapschot() is chatty: read it all. I forgot to type y because it looked like it was finished, but it was not.
  • It is very slow. It took 12 minutes to build and deploy.

All in all though, it is less trouble for me and less space taken on my hard drive. I might add a _redirects file at some point, to redirect traffic from GitHub pages to Netlify. This was more of an exploration of GitHub Actions and of usethis if anything.