3 Web Publishing

One of the easiest ways to share and get feedback on your thesis is by publishing it as its own website. bookdown—in tandem with GitHub and Netlify—makes this easy to do, even if you don’t have prior experience with web publishing:

  1. Complete Steps 1-6 in [Getting Started With Git][With Git (Recommended)].

  2. Create a Netlify account, using your GitHub account to sign up.

  3. Create a new Netlify site without connecting to Git by dragging an empty folder into the “Want to deploy a new site without connecting to Git? Drag and drop your site folder here” box.

  4. Add your Netlify API ID and a Netlify Authorization Token to your GitHub Secrets in your repository.

  5. Modify the R version on line 16 of .github/workflows/bookdown.yaml to match the R version you plan to use for this project.

  6. Either (a) use renv::restore() to re-install the exact packages declared in the project lockfile renv.lock4, or (b) use renv::init() to re-initialize the project with a brand new project library5.

  7. Commit and push any changes to your repository—this will trigger GitHub Actions to build your book and deploy it to Netlify.

  8. Replace the GitHub Actions build status badge and Netlify deployment status badge in README.md with the badge URLs from your own GitHub repository and Netlify site.

  1. You may also need to find and install the older version of R used previously with that project, unless your intention is to upgrade R.↩︎

  2. You may need to reinstall the bookdown and tinytex packages after re-initializing to ensure they are stored in the project’s lockfile↩︎