6.1 RStudio Connect

In theory, you can render the book by yourself and publish the output anywhere you want. For example, you can host the HTML files on your own web server. We have provided a function publish_book() in bookdown to make it very simple to upload your book to https://bookdown.org, which is a website provided by RStudio to host your books for free. This website is built on top of “RStudio Connect”, an RStudio product that allows you to deploy a variety of R-related applications to a server, including R Markdown documents, Shiny applications, R plots, and so on.

You do not have to know much about RStudio Connect to publish your book to bookdown.org. Basically you sign up at https://bookdown.org/connect/, and the first time you try to run bookdown::publish_book(), you will be asked to authorize bookdown to publish to your bookdown.org account. In the future, you simply call publish_book() again and bookdown will no longer ask for anything.

publish_book(name = NULL, account = NULL, server = NULL,
  render = c("none", "local", "server"))

The only argument of publish_book() that you may want to touch is render. It determines whether you want to render the book before publishing. If you have run render_book() before, you do not need to change this argument, otherwise you may set it to 'local':

bookdown::publish_book(render = "local")

If you have set up your own RStudio Connect server, you can certainly publish the book to that server instead of bookdown.org.