Connecting GitHub to Netlify with the Academic Theme

Connecting RStudio to GitHub

I’m making a note of this here because I always have trouble getting RStudio to sync with GitHub initially, and then forget what the problem was when it’s time for me to set up a new project. RStudio wouldn’t let me stage most of the blogdown files. So I had to do the following:

git add .

git commit

git push

And don’t be afraid to delete .git/index.lock …

Connecting GitHub to Netlify

After following the instructions (here)[https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/netlify.html] I got this fun error that the internet does not know how to fix:

7:25:35 PM: Error: "/opt/build/repo/themes/hugo-academic/layouts/partials/functions/get_address.html:21:1": parse failed: template: partials/functions/get_address.html:21: function "return" not defined

The problem is that it wasn’t finding netlify.toml, which the Academic theme puts in a subdirectory where Netlify couldn’t find it. And then once I moved it to the root directory, it contained additional parameters that made Netlify crash in a different way!

The solution was to delete a bunch of problematic stuff from netlify.toml down to this minimum document and put it in the website’s root folder:

[build]
  command = "hugo"
  base    = ""
  publish = "/public"

[build.environment]
  HUGO_VERSION = "0.68.3"
  HUGO_ENABLEGITINFO = "true"

[context.production.environment]
  HUGO_ENV = "production"


[[headers]]
  for = "*.webmanifest"
  [headers.values]
    Content-Type = "application/manifest+json; charset=UTF-8"

[[headers]]
  for = "index.xml"
  [headers.values]
    Content-Type = "application/rss+xml"

Then it compiled.

Removing extraneous menus

The list of menus is in this file:

config/_default/menus.toml

Also, about .gitignore..

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36185456/gitignored-files-still-shown-in-rstudio

If you want git to ignore html files, for example those in the “public” directory, after you update .gitignore you need to do the following to clear git’s cache:

git rm -r --cached public/**

git commit -m "Removed files...."

Getting Google Analytics to work

Took a while, but the crux is that you put in your Google Analytics tracking ID and do not also put anything in about Google Tags.

This file has the logic: /themes/hugo-academic/layouts/partials/marketing/google_analytics.html

So you can define either GoogleAnalytics in config.toml, or google_analytics in params.toml.