Include arbitrary files

[josherrickson]

Am I missing an automatic way to flag specific files which should be included in the built site? I'm trying to use the pkgdown site as a drat repository, and since pkgdown cleans the gh-pages branch on every rebuild, I'm having to manually add the files back.

Specifically, I need to place some files in bin/ and src/contrib/. I have these on my main branch, and ideally I'd like some way to tell pkgdown to just copy those locations/files directly over to gh-pages.

[vincentarelbundock]

Not sure if this will help, but I have a repo + pkgdown website where I host arbitrary files:

https://github.com/vincentarelbundock/Rdatasets/

What I do is basically:

• commit the files to the gh-pages branch
• deploy with pkgdown::deploy_to_branch(clean = FALSE)

Note the important clean argument.

The specific steps I take are listed in a reminder at the bottom of my README, but they are repo-specific.

[josherrickson]

Thanks - I do something similar right now but its helpful to see another example!

Where this falls down for me is needing to do clean = FALSE. This could lead to a lot of cruft building up in gh-pages. I'm OK with pkgdown cleaning out the existing gh-pages, I just want to be able to flag files that pkgdown copies over automatically, after cleaning out the existing.

[MLopez-Ibanez]

Indeed, we have a similar problem. We want to make available in the website a vignette that can only be built in PDF and we have to run a quite complicated sequence of commands:

https://github.com/MLopez-Ibanez/irace/blob/f8c50f9cc18c4a4c1d96b7e0bf1b95d0417ec5a4/.github/workflows/R-CMD-check.yaml#L193-L218

[hadley]

Seems like it would be reasonable to include some config that let you declare paths as "known" and not to be cleaned up.

[hadley]

Alternatively we could have a convention like where all files in pkgdown/include are copied to the root directory of the package site.

[hadley]

Actually, template packages use inst/pkgdown/assets/, so would probably make the most sense to copy pkgdown/assets to the docs destination dir.

[hadley]

Oh, and indeed the code to do that already exists 😬

[hadley]

And it's already documented in https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/articles/customise.html#additional-html-and-files, so I'm going to close this issue 😄