rgallery: Build a Gallery of R Snippets

This package makes it easy to create an gallery for displaying small R vignettes, or "snippets". View an example here!

Installation

Install with devtools:

devtools::install_github("dgrtwo/rgallery")

You'll need Jekyll and git installed as well.

Usage

To create and edit your gallery, simply:

1. Set up a gallery by running the following commands in R:

    library(rgallery)
    create_gallery("my-gallery")
    build_gallery("my-gallery")
   

This downloads the default r-gallery setup and builds it.

2. Back in the command line, go into the directory and start a Jekyll server:

    cd my-gallery
    jekyll serve --watch
   

3. Visit your local gallery at http://127.0.0.1:4000/.

4. To create additional snippets, add .Rmd files to the _R directory. Make sure you include layout: snippet in the YAML header. Then do build_gallery("my-gallery") to compile them.

5. To publish your gallery online for free, use GitHub pages: just make a public repository and push to the gh-pages branch. Note: You'll need to change the url parameter in _config.yml to http://<yourname>.github.io/<repo-name>.

That's all there is to it!

Additional customization

You can customize the global knitr options (for example, cache = TRUE or echo = FALSE) by adding to the knitr-options block in _config.yml:

# rgallery options
knitr-options:
  message: false

Future Plans

• Categories and tags
• Allowing multiple snippets to be connected, and therefore compiled in a row, to illustrate a larger topic or workflow
• Allowing snippet submission, as a pull request to the repository, directly from R (i.e. submit_snippet('my_snippet.Rmd', repo = 'dgrtwo/big-gallery')). Preferably allow the repository owner to build and approve the snippet from within R as well.
• Flexible front-ends, including alternatives to Jekyll