Document editing with R Markdown + GitHub Actions

This repository holds a template for establishing a CI workflow towards collaborative document editing in R Markdown. The goal is that edits to a single .Rmd file will trigger automatic builds of .pdf, .docx, .html, and .md versions of the same document via rmarkdown.

How this was set up

Let's first create the skeleton of an .Rmd document that we wish to render.

skeleton <- glue::glue('
---
title: "My document"
output: 
  github_document: default
  word_document: default
  html_document: default
  pdf_document: default
---

Introduction
---

Some highly informative text.

')

dir.create(here::here("my-document"))
cat(skeleton, file = here::here("my-document", "my-document.Rmd"))

The quickest way to get a GitHub Actions template for rendering a document is to grab this example action from r-lib which renders generic readme file. The below line initializes the file and renames it for editing.

# create yaml file
usethis::use_github_action("render-readme.yaml")

# rename to render a generic doc
fs::file_move(
  here::here(".github/workflows/render-readme.yaml"),
  here::here(".github/workflows/render-doc.yaml")
)

We then edit the .yaml in session:

usethis::edit_file('.github/workflows/render-doc.yaml')

You can view the resulting file within the repo, but for ease of reading:

on:
  push:
    paths:
      - docs/my-document.Rmd

name: Render my document

jobs:
  render:
    name: Render my document
    runs-on: macOS-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v1
      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-pandoc@v1
      - uses: r-lib/actions/setup-tinytex@v1
      - name: Install rmarkdown
        run: Rscript -e 'install.packages("rmarkdown")'
      - name: Render my document to all types
        run: Rscript -e 'rmarkdown::render("docs/my-document.Rmd", output_format = "all")'
      - name: Commit results
        run: |
          git add docs/my-document*
          git commit -m 'Re-build my-document' || echo "No changes to commit"
          git push origin || echo "No changes to commit"