This vignette teaches you how to customise the style/design of your pkgdown site. We’ll start by discussing two techniques that only require tweaks to your _pkgdown.yaml
: theming (colours and fonts) and layout (content of the navbar, sidebar, footer, …). We’ll then discuss how to add additional HTML and other files. Next, we’ll discuss how to give multiple sites the same style using a package, then finish up with some workflow advice.
library(pkgdown)
Most theming features work only with Bootstrap 5, so first update your site by adding the following lines to your _pkgdown.yml
:
template:
bootstrap: 5
Overall, the site should look pretty similar, but you will notice a number of small improvements. Most importantly, the default font is much bigger, making it considerably easier to read. Upgrading to Bootstrap 5 has a low chance of breaking your site unless you were using your own pkgdown templates or custom CSS.
There are two ways to change the visual style of your site from _pkgdown.yaml
: using a pre-packaged bootswatch theme or customising theme variables with bslib. The following sections show you how.
The easiest way to change the entire appearance of your website is to use a Bootswatch theme:
template:
bootstrap: 5
bootswatch: materia
Changing the bootswatch theme affects both the HTML (via the navbar, more on that below) and the CSS, so you’ll need to re-build your complete site with build_site()
to fully appreciate the changes. While you’re experimenting, you can speed things up by just rebuilding the home page and the CSS by running build_home_index(); init_site()
(and then refreshing the browser).
Theme with a dark background (e.g. cyborg, darkly, solar) will also need a different syntax highlight theme
. The dark equivalent of the default light colour scheme is called arrow-dark
:
template:
bootstrap: 5
bootswatch: cyborg
theme: arrow-dark
Other themes you can use are arrow-dark, arrow-light, atom-one-dark, atom-one-light, ayu-dark, ayu-light, ayu-mirage, breeze-dark, breeze-light, breezedark, dracula, espresso, github-dark, github-light, gruvbox-dark, gruvbox-light, haddock, kate, monochrome, monokai, nord, oblivion, printing, pygments, radical, solarized-dark, solarized-light, tango, vim-dark, zenburn.
Bootswatch templates with tall navbars (e.g. lux, pulse) also require that you set the pkgdown-nav-height
bslib variable:
template:
bootstrap: 5
bootswatch: lux
bslib:
pkgdown-nav-height: 100px
You can find the correct height by running $(".navbar").outerHeight()
in the javascript console.
Instead of picking a complete theme, you can tweak fonts and colours individually using bslib variables. bslib is an R package that wraps sass, the tool that Boostrap uses to produce CSS from a special language called scss. The primary advantage of scss over CSS is that it’s more programmable, so you can have a few key bslib variables that affect appearance of many HTML elements.
There are three key variables that affect the colour:
bg
(background) determines the page background.fg
(foreground) determines the text colour. bg
and fg
are mixed to yield gray-100
, gray-200
, …, grey-900
, which are used to style other elements to match the overall colour scheme.primary
sets the link colour and the (translucent) hover colour in the navbar and sidebar.template:
bootstrap: 5
bslib:
bg: "#202123"
fg: "#B8BCC2"
primary: "#306cc9"
You can customise other components by setting more specific bslib variables, taking advantage of inheritance where possible. For example, table-border-color
defaults to border-color
which defaults to gray-300
. If you want to change the colour of all borders, you can set border-color
; if you just want to change the colour of table borders, you can set table-border-color
. You can find a full list of variables in vignette("bs5-variables", package = "bslib")
.
You can also override the default fonts used for the majority of the text (base_font
), for headings (heading_font
) and for code (code_font
). The easiest way is to supply the name of a Google font:
template:
bootstrap: 5
bslib:
base_font: {google: "Roboto"}
heading_font: {google: "Roboto Slab"}
code_font: {google: "JetBrains Mono"}
While iterating on colours and other variables you only need to rerun init_site()
and refresh your browser; when iterating on fonts, you’ll need to run build_home_index(); init_site()
.
You can customise the contents of the navbar, footer, and home page sidebar using the navbar
, footer
, and sidebar
fields. They all use a similar structure that separately defines the overall structure
and the individual components
.
If you need to include additional HTML, you can add it in the following locations:
template:
includes:
in_header: <!-- inserted at the end of the head -->
before_body: <!-- inserted at the beginging of the body -->
after_body: <!-- inserted at the end of the body -->
before_title: <!-- inserted before the package title in the header ->
before_navbar: <!-- inserted before the navbar links -->
after_navbar: <!-- inserted after the navbar links -->
You can include additional files by putting them in the right place:
pkgdown/extra.css
and pkgdown/extra.js
will be copied in to rendered site and linked from <head>
(after the pkgdown defaults).
pkgdown/extra.scss
will be added to the scss ruleset used to generate the site CSS.
Any files in pkgdown/assets
will be copied to the website root directory.
For expert users: template files in pkgdown/templates
will override layout templates provided by pkgdown or template packages.
Use init_site()
to update your rendered website after making changes to these files.
To share a pkgdown style across several packages, the best workflow is to create… a package! It can contain any of the following:
inst/pkgdown/_pkgdown.yml
. This can be used to set (e.g.) author definitions, Bootstrap version and variables, the sidebar, footer, navbar, etc.inst/pkgdown/templates/
will override the default templates.inst/pkgdown/assets/
will be copied in to the destination directory.inst/pkgdown/extra.scss
will be added to the bslib ruleset.Any configuration/files supplied will override the pkgdown defaults, but will be overridden by site specific settings.
Once you have created your template package theverybest
, you can use it by:
Setting it as your sites theme:
template:
package: theverybest
If you’re building your site using GitHub actions or other similar tool, you’ll also need to installed theverybest
. If you’re using the r-lib pkgdown workflow, you can add the following line to your DESCRIPTION
:
Config/Needs/website: theverybest
To get some sense of how a theming package works, you can look at:
But please note that these templates aren’t suitable for use with your own package as they’re all designed to give a common visual identity to a specific family of packages.
If you are updating a template package that works with pkgdown 1.0.0, create directories inst/pkgdown/BS5/templates
and inst/pkgdown/BS5/assets
(if you don’t have any templates/assets make sure to a add dummy file to ensure that git tracks them). The templates
and assets
directories directly under inst/pkgdown
will be used by pkgdown 1.0.0 and by pkgdown 2.0.0 if boostrap: 3
. The directories under inst/pkgdown/BS5/
will be used for pkgdown 2.0.0 with boostrap: 5
. This lets your package support both versions of bootstrap and pkgdown.
Lastly, it might be useful for you to get a preview of the website in internal pull requests. For that, you could use Netlify and GitHub Actions (or apply a similar logic to your toolset):
NETLIFY_SITE_ID
in your repo secrets; from your account developer settings get a token to be saved as NETLIFY_AUTH_TOKEN
in your repo secrets.usethis::use_github_action("pkgdown")
, add some logic to build the site and deploy it to Netlify for pull requests from inside the repository, not pull requests from forks. Example workflow.In this vignette we explained how to change the theming and layout of pkgdown websites. Further work to improve user experience will involve:
?build_articles
) and reference indexes (?build_reference
).