Rmarkdown html site - possible to auto generate new pages from a template.Rmd file?

[dougfir]

I have a Rmd website with the following files:

• index.Rmd
• blah.Rmd
• blah2.Rmd
• _site.yml

When I run rmarkdown::render_site() a new website is created in _site.

I would like to automate the creation of new pages to the site. Here is the contents of each of the files above:

index.Rmd:

---
title: "blah"
output: html_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
\```

## R Markdown

[My home page here]

blah.Rmd:

---
title: "blah"
output: html_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
\```

## The time Is

This page was generated at `r Sys.time()`

blah2.Rmd is the exact same as blah.Rmd.

_site.yml is:

name: "my-website"
navbar:
  title: "My Website"
  left:
    - text: "Home"
      href: index.html
    - text: "blah"
      href: blah.html
    - text: "blah2"
      href: blah2.html

I would like to copy blah.Rmd, call it template.Rmd and run it e.g. every hour. template.Rmd:

---
title: "blah"
output: html_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
\```

## The time Is

This page was generated at `r Sys.time()`

I wouldlike to run this new file, template.Rmd every hour and when run, to update the _site.yml with a link to the newly created page. E.g.

name: "my-website"
navbar:
  title: "My Website"
  left:
    - text: "Home"
      href: index.html
    - text: "blah"
      href: blah.html
    - text: "blah2"
      href: blah2.html
    - text: "2020-11-09 17:53:54 UTC"
      href: `2020-11-09 17:53:54 UTC`.html # won't work in this format I guess.

If I was to create the entire site right now, each page, blah and blah2 would say the exact same time. But what I want is the following:

• Every hour template.Rmd is run and generates a new page to be added to the site. The page name should be Sys.time() or similar.

• The content of the page, per the example in blah.Rmd is the time that the page was generated.

• Even though the Rmd file is called template.Rmd, the newly generated page, done each hour, is not called template.html but the timestamp of whent he page was generated.

Is what I am asking possible? Or is there a better approach? Basically I'm trying to build an Rmd site with the ability to append new pages over time without having to regenerate the entire site each time?