Configure a GitHub Pages site

Activates or reconfigures a GitHub Pages site for a project hosted on GitHub. This function anticipates two specific usage modes:

• Publish from the root directory of a gh-pages branch, which is assumed to be only (or at least primarily) a remote branch. Typically the gh-pages branch is managed by an automatic "build and deploy" job, such as the one configured by use_github_action("pkgdown").

• Publish from the "/docs" directory of a "regular" branch, probably the repo's default branch. The user is assumed to have a plan for how they will manage the content below "/docs".

Usage

use_github_pages(branch = "gh-pages", path = "/", cname = NA)

Arguments

branch, path

Branch and path for the site source. The default of branch = "gh-pages" and path = "/" reflects strong GitHub support for this configuration: when a gh-pages branch is first created, it is automatically published to Pages, using the source found in "/". If a gh-pages branch does not yet exist on the host, use_github_pages() creates an empty, orphan remote branch.

The most common alternative is to use the repo's default branch, coupled with path = "/docs". It is the user's responsibility to ensure that this branch pre-exists on the host.

Note that GitHub does not support an arbitrary path and, at the time of writing, only "/" or "/docs" are accepted.

cname

Optional, custom domain name. The NA default means "don't set or change this", whereas a value of NULL removes any previously configured custom domain.

Note that this can add or modify a CNAME file in your repository. If you are using Pages to host a pkgdown site, it is better to specify its URL in the pkgdown config file and let pkgdown manage CNAME.

Value

Site metadata returned by the GitHub API, invisibly

See also

• use_pkgdown_github_pages() combines use_github_pages() with other functions to fully configure a pkgdown site

• https://docs.github.com/en/pages

• https://docs.github.com/en/rest/pages

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
use_github_pages()
use_github_pages(branch = git_default_branch(), path = "/docs")
} # }