This is a quick guide to hosting xaringan slides online using github pages.

To start with I create an RStudio project (initialising a git repository) and then slides.Rmd using the xaringan R markdown template. At this point we could modify the R markdown file but I’m going to make sure it works online first.

Having created slides.html by knitting the R markdown file, we can commit everything we’ve got.

git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit, creating slides."

Now (if it hasn’t already happened) we need to add the remote repo. Presuming we have SSH keys set up then we can add the remote from the command line

git remote add origin git@github.com:user/repo_name.git

and push what we’ve got.

git push -u origin master

We now have a couple of choices. If you are happy working with multiple branches in a repo then we can create a gh-pages branch and everything will happen automatically. This has the advantage that you can update other branches and only publish the gh-pages branch when you are happy for the slides to be live.

We can create and move to the new branch

git checkout -b gh-pages

and push.

git push origin gh-pages

The alternative is to change settings on github and use the master branch. To do this got to Settings, scroll down to Github Pages section and choose the Source to be the master branch.

Either way, if we now wait a few minutes the slides will be available at https://user.github.io/repo_name/slides.html.