Usethis: Better documentation of pkgdown deployment

[thomasp85]

Getting travis to deploy pkgdown pages as part of the CI is not straightforward and should be better documented...

[maelle]

@thomasp85 I'm using rudely your issue as an opportunity to mention https://github.com/ropenscilabs/travis/

If you do

usethis::use_pkgdown()
travis::use_tic()

It works like magic (making you browse the right pages). ✨ Last time I've used it was for cransays https://itsalocke.com/blog/cransays---follow-your-r-package-journey-to-cranterbury-with-our-dashboard/ and it worked so well.

End of promotion. 👼

[thomasp85]

You are right insofar that it works if you own and work from the main repository. If you work from a fork it less apparent as you currently have to change the tracking branch for the travis package to pick up the right repo to add deployment settings to.

[maelle]

Ah yes, I was definitely describing an easy use case! 🙈

[maelle]

Related https://github.com/ropenscilabs/travis/issues/88

[hadley]

@maelle we don't use tic as part of our standard workflow.

@thomasp85 this should now be documented at https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/reference/deploy_site_github.html. Please file issues there if you notice anything missing.

[rcorty]

May want to add that, following this procedure, the pkgdown site will be available at: http(s)://[username].github.io/[projectname]

[konradzdeb]

I find that original point expressed by @thomasp85:

Getting travis to deploy pkgdown pages as part of the CI is not straightforward and should be better documented...

is still valid. I have followd the configruation available through ?pkgdown::deploy_site_github; however, Travis was returning the following error:

Deploying application
Error: No built tarball detected, please provide the location of one with `tarball`
Execution halted
Script failed with status 1

failed to deploy

It seems that the PKG_TARBALL variable used in deploy_site_github wasn't exported.

tarball = Sys.getenv("PKG_TARBALL", "")

I attempted fixing that by expanding the before_deploy in the manner shown below that I've sourced from travis configuration that I found online.

before_deploy:
   - Rscript -e 'remotes::install_cran("pkgdown")'
   - R CMD INSTALL .
   - export PKG_TARBALL=$(Rscript -e 'pkg <- devtools::as.package("."); cat(paste0(pkg$package,"_",pkg$version,".tar.gz"))')

so far with no luck. I reckon that other elements of my .travis.yml may be problematic but more comprehensive documentation creating suitable configuration would help.

[jennybc]

@konradzdeb It sounds like what you're talking about is best brought up on the pkgdown package repo itself, since you're really talking about pkgdown::deploy_site_github(). usethis just provides a high-level wrapper for the setup.

That being said, a lot of people do actually succeed with usethis::use_pkgdown(). I suspect one source of failure is different initial states and other setup that departs from what we expect/do. For example, the line R CMD INSTALL . would be very unusual in our standard .travis.yml files. Here's the entire build matrix for usethis, which also successfully builds and deploys the pkgdown website:

matrix:
  include:
  - r: devel
  - r: release
    after_success: Rscript -e 'covr::codecov()'
    before_deploy: Rscript -e 'remotes::install_cran("pkgdown")'
    deploy:
      provider: script
      script: Rscript -e 'pkgdown::deploy_site_github()'
      skip_cleanup: true
  - r: oldrel
  - r: 3.4
  - r: 3.3
  - r: 3.2

[skysign]

Hi @konradzdeb

Now I got completely same error as you got, below.

Error: No built tarball detected, please provide the location of one with `tarball`

Could you share how to resolve it?