extendr.rs

The extendr.rs website provides documentation and news for extendr, a developer-first utility for building R packages that call Rust code. The website is built using the Rust-powered static site generator, Zola.

Stack

• Zola — Rust-powered static site generator, a simplified version of Hugo with a powerful templating engine
• Tailwind CSS v4 — utility-first CSS framework
• basecoat-css — a lightweight shadcn/ui components library built with Tailwind CSS
• knitr — an R package that executes code chunks, interleaves output, and writes back to markdown
• Bun — javascript runtime and package manager
• iconify — a Tailwind extension for icons (currently limited to fa7-brands, lucide, and mdi icons)

The build pipeline:

1. Tailwind compiles css/*.css to static/style.css.
2. knitr executes code in r-markdown/**/*.qmd and compiles to commonmark in content/**/*.md.
3. Zola compiles commonmark in content/ to HTML and builds site in public/.

Structure

.
├── zola.toml          # Site configuration
├── justfile           # All build/dev/scaffolding tasks
├── content/           # Zola markdown
│   ├── blog/          # Blog posts
│   ├── contributing/  # Contributor docs
│   ├── development/   # Development docs
│   ├── publishing/    # Publishing docs
│   └── rust-intro/    # Rust intro for R users
├── r-markdown/        # R markdown
├── templates/         # Zola HTML templates + shortcodes and macros
├── css/               # Tailwind input
├── static/            # Compiled CSS, JS, assets
├── bun.lock           # Pinned dependency versions
├── package.json       # Bun project manifest
├── packages/          # Example R packages built with extendr
└── scripts/           # R scripts

Development

Prerequisites

In addition to the stack software listed above, you will need R installed and the most recent release version of the rextendr package. The just command line runner will also be very beneficial to you.

Installation

# install Node.js dependencies
just install

Development

# start a local development server (Zola serve and Tailwind watcher)
just dev

Building

# render Tailwind style.css and call zola build
just build

Available recipes

Run just without arguments to list available recipes.

Available recipes:
    build           # Compile Tailwind css, then build the site with Zola
    check           # Try to build site without rendering (checks links)
    dev             # Run Tailwind watch and Zola live serve in parallel
    install         # Install Node.js dependencies
    page path       # Create a new documentation page at r-markdown/{{path}}.qmd
    post title      # Create a new blog post at r-markdown/blog/{{title}}/index.qmd
    render path="." # Render page or project in r-markdown/ (ignores r-markdown/blog/ when rendering project)
    reset           # Clear public directory generated by Zola
    tailwind-build  # Generate Tailwind static/style.css from css/style.css