Make Static HTML Documentation for a Package.
pkgdown 
pkgdown is designed to make it quick and easy to build a website for your package. You can see pkgdown in action at https://pkgdown.r-lib.org: this is the output of pkgdown applied to the latest version of pkgdown. Learn more in vignette("pkgdown") or ?build_site.
Installation
# Install released version from CRAN
install.packages("pkgdown")
# Install development version from GitHub
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("r-lib/pkgdown")
Usage
Get started with usethis:
# Run once to configure your package to use and deploy pkgdown
usethis::use_pkgdown_github_pages()
# Preview your site locally before publishing
pkgdown::build_site()
This adds the necessary components and sets up GitHub Actions[^1] for automatic site building when deploying. Your README.md becomes the homepage, documentation in man/ generates a function reference, and vignettes will be rendered into articles/.
pkgdown 2.0.0 and Bootstrap 5
pkgdown 2.0.0 includes an upgrade from Bootstrap 3 to Bootstrap 5, which is accompanied by a whole bunch of minor UI improvements. If you’ve heavily customised your site, there’s a small chance that this will break your site, so everyone needs to explicitly opt-in to the upgrade by adding the following to _pkgdown.yml:
template:
bootstrap: 5
Then learn about the many new ways to customise your site in vignette("customise").
In the wild
At last count, pkgdown is used by over 12,000 packages. Here are a few examples:
bayesplot (source): plotting functions for posterior analysis, model checking, and MCMC diagnostics.
valr (source): read and manipulate genome intervals and signals.
mkin (source): calculation routines based on the FOCUS Kinetics Report
NMF (source): a framework to perform non-negative matrix factorization (NMF).
Comparing the source and output of these sites is a great way to learn new pkgdown techniques.
Code of conduct
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.
[^1]: If you don’t use GitHub, you can use usethis::use_pkgdown() + pkgdown::build_site() to create a website.