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I have a large site built on blogdown. Every day, there are several new .Rmd files that need to be rendered to html files. Before this recent blogdown update, I relied on serve_site() to render the new .Rmd files. After the update, as mentioned in the "release notes", we wouldn't need to call serve_site() explicitly; however, if I didn't call serve_site(), I cannot seem to get the html files rendered, and cannot preview the site in Rstudio. The public/ did not get updated either. (Even if I call serve_site(), I still cannot get the html files rendered...)

I noticed that blogdown::build_site(build_rmd = TRUE) can render all rmd files, but I don't want to rebuild the whole site. I wondered if I miss anything, or is there a way that I can only get the new .Rmd files render to html and copied to the public/ directory automatically in this new version? Thank you so much!

R session info

Yihui Xie
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Hannah Wang
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2 Answers2

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The quickest fix is to revert to the previous version of blogdown until the bug is documented and/or fixed.

I would recommend reverting using the versions package, it makes the process quite painless.

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/versions/versions.pdf

Best of luck!

Davide Lorino
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With the latest version of blogdown on CRAN, serve_site() is called automatically when you open the RStudio project. If you add new Rmd files after that, they should be compiled automatically, but if you add them before you open the RStudio project, or call serve_site(), they won't be recognized. You can install the development version of blogdown (in which I just pushed a change), and these new Rmd files should be automatically compiled when you serve_site():

remotes::install_github('rstudio/blogdown')
Yihui Xie
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  • I actually added new Rmd files after I opened the RStudio project, but I think they did not compile automatically... I ended up installing the development version, and use blogdown::build_site(build_rmd = "timestamp"), which works, thank you! I'm still not able to preview the site in Rstudio though (didn't get the preview when I opened up the project either). – Hannah Wang Oct 19 '20 at 05:54
  • I'll fix the issue to compile new Rmd files automatically. For the automatic preview, you need to set the RStudio project type to be "website" (your `.Rproj` file should have a line like the last line here: https://github.com/rbind/yihui/blob/master/yihui.org.Rproj), and have an `index.Rmd` like this: https://github.com/rbind/yihui/blob/master/index.Rmd – Yihui Xie Oct 19 '20 at 16:50
  • @HannahWang I just fixed the issue for new Rmd files. With the dev version, they should be compiled automatically. Please let me know if it works for you. Thanks! – Yihui Xie Oct 19 '20 at 17:16
  • I tested on a smaller site and the new .Rmd files compiled automatically, and the preview also works! But for this large site I'm working on, I'm using code to generate batches of .Rmd files that will be put into several nested-level subdirectories. I think it works better if I stop the server-> generate the new .Rmd files->render the new .Rmd to html files. Will the feature build_site(build_rmd = "timestamp") be kept in the future? Thank you!! – Hannah Wang Oct 19 '20 at 23:08
  • Yes, it will be kept. – Yihui Xie Oct 20 '20 at 01:50