A note from the authors: Some of the information and instructions in this book are now out of date because of changes to Hugo and the blogdown package. If you have suggestions for improving this book, please file an issue in our GitHub repository. Thanks for your patience while we work to update the book, and please stay tuned for the revised version!
In the meantime, you can find an introduction to the changes and new features in the v1.0 release blog post and this "Up & running with blogdown in 2021" blog post.
— Yihui, Amber, & Alison
D.1 More global options
There are a few more advanced global options in addition to those introduced in Section 1.5, and they are listed in Table D.1.
| Option name | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| blogdown.hugo.dir | The directory of the Hugo executable | |
| blogdown.method | html | The building method for R Markdown |
| blogdown.publishDir | The publish dir for local preview | |
| blogdown.new_bundle | FALSE | Create a new post in a bundle? |
| blogdown.widgetsID | TRUE | Incremental IDs for HTML widgets? |
If you want to install Hugo to a custom path, you can set the global option blogdown.hugo.dir to a directory to store the Hugo executable before you call install_hugo(), e.g., options(blogdown.hugo.dir = '~/Downloads/hugo_0.20.1/'). This may be useful for you to use a specific version of Hugo for a specific website,38 or store a copy of Hugo on a USB Flash drive along with your website.
The option blogdown.method is explained in Section D.9.
When your website project is under version control in the RStudio IDE, continuously previewing the site can be slow, if it contains hundreds of files or more. The default publish directory is public/ under the project root directory, and whenever you make a change in the source that triggers a rebuild, RStudio will be busy tracking file changes in the public/ directory. The delay before you see the website in the RStudio Viewer can be 10 seconds or even longer. That is why we provide the option blogdown.publishDir. You may set a temporary publish directory to generate the website, and this directory should not be under the same RStudio project, e.g., options(blogdown.publishDir = '../public_site'), which means the website will be generated to the directory public_site/ under the parent directory of the current project.
To understand the option blogdown.new_bundle, you have to know the concept of page bundles in Hugo. When this option is set to TRUE, the function blogdown::new_site() (or the RStudio addin “New Post”) will create a new post as the index file of a page bundle, e.g., post/2015-07-23-bye-world/index.md instead of post/2015-07-23-bye-world.md. One benefit of using a page bundle instead of a normal page file is that you can put resource files associated with the post (such as images) under the same directory of the post. This means you no longer have to put them under the static/ directory, which is often confusing to Hugo beginners.
The option blogdown.widgetsID is only relevant if your website source is under version control and you have HTML widgets on the website. If this option is TRUE (default), the random IDs of HTML widgets will be changed to incremental IDs in the HTML output, so these IDs are unlikely to change every time you recompile your website; otherwise, every time you will get different random IDs.