How to use bookdown.org with github?

Question

I am trying to create a book on Github and honestly I don't have the time to learn how to code and dig into all the new terminology/technology and learn the in and outs of Github as it's really not user-friendly.

All the tutorials are too dense and not suited for beginners. I just want to generate content for my book. How can I do this? I'm pretty good at just taking a template and adapting it to my needs, but I can't even get a template to work.

I've installed the bookdown package in R and have opened up the sample book in R. How do I get this sample book onto Github website? I just uploaded all the files and when I go to my website, it just takes me to README.md
I am using Github through my browser and don't plan on installing whatever Github software there is and all that kind of stuff. I really don't have time to dig into how to use Github. So any tutorial will require me using Github through the browser.
When writing content for my book, is there a way to do it on the Github, or is doing it in Rstudio the easiest way?
I don't have much desire to upload my book to bookdown.org. Can I still build my website on github?
Do I need to convert Rmd files to md files? How do I do that?

There are plenty of books out there on Github (bookdown.org show cases many). I believe you are able to view the files/code and what not on Github, so it may be pretty easy to just grab a couple necessary files there. I don't know which ones are important, and even if I did, I don't know how to get it to work with my Github.

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 19 '20 at 00:21

4

You can fork the rstudio/bookdown-demo and make it your own GitHub repository.

From there, follow yihui/bookdown/get-started.html, with, at a minimum:

Download the GitHub repository https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown-demo as a Zip file, then unzip it locally.
So no need for "Git/GitHub software" there.
Install the RStudio IDE. Note that you need a version higher than 1.0.0. Please download the latest version if your RStudio version is lower than 1.0.0.

Install the R package bookdown:

 # stable version on CRAN
 install.packages('bookdown')
 # or development version on GitHub
 # devtools::install_github('rstudio/bookdown')

Open the bookdown-demo repository you downloaded in RStudio by clicking bookdown-demo.Rproj.
Open the R Markdown file index.Rmd and click the button Build Book on the Build tab of RStudio.

Try that with a minimal example like yihui/bookdown-minimal

answered Jul 19 '20 at 00:21

VonC

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Ok, I did that, downlaoded xelatex, pandoc, tinytext, and am still having errors, will have to post another question to solve. – we_are_all_in_this_together Jul 19 '20 at 11:12
And then I tried "knit" and then publish and Rstudio needs to connect to some server, which makes me wonder if I needed to even download pandoc and xelatax or I just instealled bloatware... – we_are_all_in_this_together Jul 19 '20 at 11:23
The error I get of I click on "build" is: output file: bookdown-demo.knit.md Error: LaTeX failed to compile bookdown-demo.tex. See https://yihui.org/tinytex/r/#debugging for debugging tips. In addition: Warning message: In system2(..., stdout = if (use_file_stdout()) f1 else FALSE, stderr = f2) : '"xelatex"' not found Execution halted Exited with status 1. – we_are_all_in_this_together Jul 19 '20 at 11:28
@we_are_all_in_this_together OK, let me know the link of your new question – VonC Jul 19 '20 at 11:32
Well I still can't get a template website – we_are_all_in_this_together Jul 19 '20 at 11:34
I'll just give you the pts for now. I don't want to feel obligated to check back within 7 days. Thanks for the help – we_are_all_in_this_together Jul 21 '20 at 01:52

How to use bookdown.org with github?

1 Answers1