How do I programmatically automate .rmd file to PDF using knitr?

Question

I can produce my reports rather quickly thanks to knitr and RDoc; however I want to streamline my process a little more by automatically generating the documents in my R script.

Do ya'lls have any solutions or resources I could use to further investigate to create a solution?

Munge don't mangle. Have you tried using knitr with PDF output mode? — Serban Tanasa, May 19 '15 at 13:06
Yes I can create it all in Rstudio; but I want to further automate this so that I can create a cron job. — C Ried, May 19 '15 at 13:08
You know you can knit things without using the "Knit" button by using command line and something like: Rscript -e "library(knitr); knit('my_sweave_file.Rnw')" pdflatex my_sweave_file.tex — Serban Tanasa, May 19 '15 at 13:10
Ok.. I'm just a little dense I guess; could not find exactly that. — C Ried, May 19 '15 at 13:15

Serban Tanasa · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-16T12:43:12.373

To automate a knitr job you can use something like the command line below.

Rscript -e "library(knitr); knit2pdf('myRnw.Rnw')"

Put that in a .sh file and you can cron tab it all you want.

Explanation (aka the same again in English):

Rscript is the script-running version of R
Rscript -e "myexpression();" is the expression runner, it runs everything in the quotes. See Rscript --help for more detail.
library(knitr) -- well, you can't knit without knowing how, obviously neither can R
knit2pdf( '/path/to/file', ...) lookup the ? help on the function or search for more examples online.

How do I programmatically automate .rmd file to PDF using knitr?

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