GitHub Documents

Overview

The GitHub document format generates GitHub compatible markdown (.md) files which are subsequently rendered to HTML when viewed on GitHub. The keep_md option of the HTML document format has traditionally been used for creating GitHub documents, however the github_document format has several advantages:

• Use of full Pandoc markdown (e.g. citations) which is converted to GitHub markdown.
• A local HTML preview (using CSS based on GitHub) is available for the document.
• When using RStudio the local HTML preview is written to a temporary directory (and so won’t be checked in or require a .gitignore).
• Optional generation of a table of contents from section headings.
• Support for including shared header and/or footer content.

To create a GitHub document from R Markdown you specify the github_document output format in the front-matter of your document:

---
title: "Habits"
author: John Doe
date: March 22, 2005
output: github_document
---

install.packages("rmarkdown")

HTML Preview

By default when you render a GitHub document markdown file (.md) an HTML preview file (.html) is also written so you can see what the document will look like when it is rendered on GitHub.

When you call rmarkdown::render directly from the command line the preview file is written alongside the generated .md file. However, when you render from within RStudio using the Knit button the preview HTML is written to a temporary directory and then automatically displayed by RStudio.

You can suppress the creation of preview HTML using the html_preview option. For example:

---
title: "Habits"
output:
  github_document:
    html_preview: false
---

Table of Contents

You can add a table of contents using the toc option and specify the depth of headers that it applies to using the toc_depth option. For example:

---
title: "Habits"
output:
  github_document:
    toc: true
    toc_depth: 2
---

If the table of contents depth isn’t explicitly specified then it defaults to 3 (meaning that all level 1, 2, and 3 headers will be included in the table of contents).

Figure Options

The fig_width and fig_height options can be used to control the default figure width and height (7x5 is used if values are not explicitly specified). The dev option controls which graphics device is used for output (the default is “png”) For example:

---
title: "Habits"
output:
  github_document:
    fig_width: 5
    fig_height: 5
    dev: jpeg
---

Includes

You can do more advanced customization of output by including additional content. To include content in the document header or before/after the document body you use the includes option as follows:

---
title: "Habits"
output:
  github_document:
    includes:
      in_header: header.md
      before_body: doc_prefix.md
      after_body: doc_suffix.md
---

Markdown Extensions

By default R Markdown is defined as all pandoc markdown extensions with the following tweaks for backward compatibility with the markdown package:

+autolink_bare_uris
+ascii_identifier
+tex_math_single_backslash

You can enable or disable markdown extensions using the md_extensions option (you preface an option with - to disable and + to enable it). For example:

---
title: "Habits"
output:
  github_document:
    md_extensions: -autolink_bare_uris+hard_line_breaks
---

The above would disable the autolink_bare_uris extension and enable the hard_line_breaks extension.

For more on available markdown extensions see the pandoc markdown specification.

Pandoc Arguments

If there are pandoc features you want to use that lack equivalents in the YAML options described above you can still use them by passing custom pandoc_args. For example:

---
title: "Habits"
output:
  github_document:
    pandoc_args: [
      "--filter", "/opt/local/filters/myfilter"
    ]
---

Documentation on all available pandoc arguments can be found in the pandoc user guide.

Shared Options

If you want to specify a set of default options to be shared by multiple documents within a directory you can include a file named _output.yaml within the directory. Note that no YAML delimiters or enclosing output object are used in this file. For example:

_output.yaml

github_document:
  fig_width: 5
  fig_height: 5

All documents located in the same directory as _output.yaml will inherit it’s options. Options defined explicitly within documents will override those specified in the shared options file.