Automated tutorial builds from package vignettes

[sckott]

We have a template that builds markdown pages with a template from .Rmd vignettes for our website now, but would be nice to automate this more. Hopefully a relatively small task, but haven't gotten around to it yet. The rOpenGov team have used rake tasks to try to automate building tutorials from vignettes - perhaps we can build on what they have.

[cboettig]

:+1: yeah I think this is a great one to knock off for the hackathon. Perhaps something we can work into the continuous integration pipeline.

I've started just using a Makefile like this to update both the package Vignette and the Github README file, would be easy to add another line that could push an approriately templated md or html copy to the ropensci.org site...

[karthik]

Will second this. I'm testing out a micro EC2 box we can keep on 24/7 to do this automation (and also maintain status.ropensci.org.)

[sckott]

cool, The ropengov team uses rake tasks I believe, either way...

[mfenner]

I have recently started to use DigitalOcean instead of EC2. Works well so far and is cheaper.

[sckott]

+1 for Digital Ocean, and I didn't need to set ports for RStudio server to work

[karthik]

What's the cost comparison? say to a m 2.4 large

[sckott]

don't know

[karthik]

I suppose this is all very trivial to discuss. The cost for a micro instance is negligible anyway (we don't need anything larger for a status page) and port forwarding can easily be configured in a security group (Digital Ocean opening up 8787 or everything automatically doesn't seem like a good thing).

Either way we should just figure out the set up of the box itself and go from there.