jemus42 / bookdown-debugging

Trying a setup for bookdown on travis-ci while using XeTeX, custom fonts, renv, and deployment

bookdown-debugging

This is a minimal example of a book based on R Markdown and bookdown (https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown).
This repository tests various thing I find myself wanting to do, but don't want to have to work out with actual projects each time.

CI Provider	Deployment Target	GitBook	PDF	Output
GitHub Actions	Netlify	✔️	❌	https://jemus42-bookdown-debugging.netlify.app/
Travis CI	GitHub Pages	✔️	✔️	https://jemus42.github.io/bookdown-debugging/
Travis CI	Server / ssh + rsync	✔️	✔️	https://bookdown-debug.tadaa-data.de/

This project "demonstrates":

• Using renv with bookdown and CI/CD providers see also
• Building via travis CI and deploying via SSH to a server (see .travis.yml)
  • Bonus feature: Installing Adobe Source (Serif|Sans|Code) Pro fonts for the PDF output (bin/get_adobe_fonts.sh)
• Building via GitHub actions and deploying to netlify (see .github/workflows/bookdown.yaml)

The DESCRIPTION file

This is more of a dummy file, but it's required for travis to recognize this as an R project.
The Imports: field normally is used for dependency management, but since renv is used, this isn't really necessary.
It should also be noted that renv bootstraps itself via .Rprofile, so renv doesn't need to be installed explicitly before renv::restore is called.

Using renv for package management

Set up renv and use as normal.

renv::init()

renv::snapshot()

As long as renv::restore() is called in .travis.yml (/ whatever CI config) and caching is set up (optional, but recommended), this should work just fine.
Some dependencies might not be picked up automatically, like ragg which is used only by setting dev = ragg_png in _output.yml for bookdown::gitbook.
I "solve" this by just calling library(ragg) explicitly, because renv::record() is more annoying.

Deployment

GitHub Pages

Add your $GITHUB_PAT to travis by whatever means you're used to, the rest is handled via .travis.yml.

Netlify (WIP)

Based on this blog post and using the GitHub action for bookdown as a basis (usethis::use_github_action("bookdown")).

It works fine for HTML (GitBook) output for now, but PDF output and custom fonts are WIP.

Script deployment via rsync / ssh

This is based on https://oncletom.io/2016/travis-ssh-deploy:

# Generate a new rsa key
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C '[e-mail]' -f ./deploy_rsa

# Encrypt the key and add to travis repo, requires travis CLI tool (brew install travis)
travis encrypt-file deploy_rsa --add

# Add the key to your server
ssh-copy-id -i deploy_rsa.pub -p 54321 [e-mail]

# Delete (as to *really really* not accidentally publish)
rm -f deploy_rsa deploy_rsa.pub

# Add changes
git add deploy_rsa.enc .travis.yml

The corresponding lines in .travis.yml are added by travis, but will have to be moved to the before_deploy step in .travis.yml including the ssh-agent step etc.