This tutorial is roughly based on the blog post "Up and running with blogdown" by Alison Presmanes Hill.

Pre-tutorial To Do

To participate in the tutorial please have done the following:

• Install R
• Install RStudio
• Run install.packages("blogdown") in R
• Run blogdown::install_hugo() in R (for a Mac user recommended to have homebrew installed first)

If you want to push up the website:

• Make sure you have a GitHub account
• Make a Netlify account

Instructions to Build Website

• Create a folder to hold the project
• Open RStudio, go to Project —> New Project —> Existing Directory —> [navigate to the folder you just created] —> Create Project
• Build the template of your site selecting a theme, we'll use the Academic theme create via blogdown::new_site(theme = "gcushen/hugo-academic", theme_example = TRUE)
• Go to Tools —> Project Options —> Build Tools —> [uncheck Preview site after building] —> OK
• To look at the current version of site run blogdown::serve_site()
• Edit config.toml to display your name and any other changes you would like
• Update content/home/about.md to your information
• Write a new post, by running blogdown::new_post([TITLE], ext = “.Rmd”) and filling in the content as you would for writing a typical Rmd document
• Look at the public folder at various points to see the rendered version of your website

Instructions to Upload the Website

• Enable git in RStudio, Project Options —> Git/SVN —> Version control system —> Git —> [click yes]
• Go to Git —> Commit and see the list of files
• Add public/ to .gitignore
• Commit the rest of the files
• Go to GitHub and create a new repository
• Scroll down to where it says ...or push an existing repository from the command line, copy the commands
• Open a terminal in RStudio by going to Git —> [the cog symbol] —> Shell...; paste into the terminal the code you copied and run
• Check that the repository on GitHub is updated with files
• Go to Netlify and click New site from Git and choose GitHub
• Choose the repository you just created
• Check the configuration: 1) publish directory is public, 2) make sure HUGO_VERSION is the same as when you type hugo version in your terminal
• Click Deploy site
• To change the name (for free) go to Site Settings —> Site Details —> Change site name