Howto Build .Rmd with Images in blogdown

R Programming

Author

Sam

Published

April 3, 2020

CAVEAT: I am very much a newbie to R, rmarkdown, blogdown, bookdown, and Hugo.

I have been racking my brain for a way to do what should be a simple thing using blogdown.

I am experimenting with blogdown, Hugo and a theme for a static website. By the way, I have posted this to Wordpress using R. I have deciphered a way to do that earlier and posted it here. However, I ran into problems attempting to post to a static blog using blogdown and Hugo with a post that contains an image.

First, I have a file that I want in the Rmarkdown syntax with a .rmd extension (I like R). That file contains math formulas, R code blocks that need to execute (this breaks Hugo and the .md formatted file). The .rmd file needs to be several things; a PDF file and a HTML file. I want the file notation to use rmarkdown syntax, including the image reference. Now, this creates a problem for the theme I elect to use (gohugo-theme-ananke).
Hugo does different things with .rmd files and .md files. So I was jumping through hoops trying to figure how to do this, and now find out two things need to be done.

First, the config.toml file needs to have this added in the top section:

ignoreFiles = ["\\.Rmd$", "\\.rmd$", "\\.Rmarkdown$", "_files$", "_cache$"]

Secondly, to enter images in a Rmd file, just add this line:
```
![Alternate name](/images/Name_of_image.png)
```

Notice there are no quotes around the filename. And that is the gist of it.

Another problem I had was getting the date and title into a post. This is done easiest with the following line from inside R:

blogdown:::new_post()

which gives a interactive GUI to enter the info. Then close that html window and you see a file in vim. You can add content there or close and edit it in a GUI text editor. I prefer the standard gnome text editor because of the highlighting functionality.

If the website needs to be built, from within R, type the following:

 blogdown::build_site(method="html")

Next, starting the website can be done two ways, within R with:

 blogdown::serve_site()

or from the CLI as such:

 hugo server