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bookdown Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown

Yihui Xie

Section 4.4 Configuration

We have mentioned rmd_files in Section 1.3, and there are more (optional) settings you can configure for a book in _bookdown.yml
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For the bs4_book() format, the edit, history, and view fields have no effect and similar configuration can be specified with the repo argument of the output function
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  • book_filename: the filename of the main Rmd file, i.e., the Rmd file that is merged from all chapters; by default, it is named _main.Rmd.
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  • delete_merged_file: whether to delete the main Rmd file after the book is successfully rendered.
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  • before_chapter_script: one or multiple R scripts to be executed before each chapter, e.g., you may want to clear the workspace before compiling each chapter, in which case you can use rm(list = ls(all = TRUE)) in the R script.
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  • after_chapter_script: similar to before_chapter_script, and the R script is executed after each chapter.
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  • edit: a link that collaborators can click to edit the Rmd source document of the current page; this was designed primarily for GitHub repositories, since it is easy to edit arbitrary plain-text files on GitHub even in other people’s repositories. This link should have %s in it, which will be substituted by the actual Rmd filename for each page.
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  • history: similar to edit, a link to the edit/commit history of the current page.
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  • view: similar to edit, a link to source code of the current page.
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  • rmd_subdir: whether to search for book source Rmd files in subdirectories (by default, only the root directory is searched). This may be either a boolean or list of paths if you want to search for book source Rmd files in a subset of subdirectories.
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  • include_md: include .md files in search for book source (by default only .Rmd files are included).
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  • output_dir: the output directory of the book (_book by default); this setting is read and used by render_book().
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  • clean: a vector of files and directories to be cleaned by the clean_book() function.
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Here is a sample _bookdown.yml:
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book_filename: "my-book.Rmd"
delete_merged_file: true
before_chapter_script: ["script1.R", "script2.R"]
after_chapter_script: "script3.R"
view: https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown-demo/blob/master/%s
edit: https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown-demo/edit/master/%s
output_dir: "book-output"
clean: ["my-book.bbl", "R-packages.bib"]
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