First, we load googlesites and specify the domain and site name we’ll be working with. Creating a completely new site is only available to GSuite users (formerly known as Google Apps), so you should have already created a classic site using the web UI and know the domain and site name to plug into the package options. These options allow you to edit the site without specifying it explicitly on each request.
library(googlesites)
options(googlesites.site_domain = "site")
options(googlesites.site_name = "sitesrtest")Second, you need to use the googleAuthR package to get your OAuth2.0 token to make edits to your site from the R script. If it’s your first time authenticating you RStudio will pop open your browser and ask you to authenticate interactively. After you’ve authenticated for the first time, a file called .httr-oauth will appear in your working directory. Every subsequent time that you run gar_auth() it will use the cached .httr-oauth file instead of making you do it interactively.
library(googleAuthR)
options(googleAuthR.scopes.selected = "https://sites.google.com/feeds/")
gar_auth()You can add a page based on a local, static HTML document. Webpages in Google Sites are based on HTML. You can specify new content with HTML that runs inside the template of your site. The HTML may not have some JavaScript and other potential security risks, so more advanced documents might need tweaking before deploying. Also, the data is transferred via XML, so your HTML must be XHTML compliant. This means that every tag should have a correpsonding closing tag. Do not write <img src="test.png">. Instead you should write <img src="test.png" />.
test_html <- system.file("extdata", "example-site", "test.html", package="googlesites")
add_html_page(page_xhtml_source = test_html,
page_title = 'API Test',
page_custom_url = 'api-test',
overwrite=TRUE)
#> Creating New Page
#> Successfully Created Page Skeleton
#> Replacing Links to Local Files
#> Successfully Added All Page Content
#> $page_id
#> [1] "https://sites.google.com/feeds/content/site/sitesrtest/4618599740961579025"
#>
#> $page_url
#> [1] "https://sites.google.com/site/sitesrtest/api-test"The package comes with a function to find content on your site. You can specify which field to search on (title, id, url), then find content matching your desired value against that field. You can also restrict to certain types of content like webpages, announcements, templates. Here is an example where we find the page we just created by its title.
find_content(value_to_match='API Test',
field_to_match='title',
content_category='webpage')
#> id
#> 1 https://sites.google.com/feeds/content/site/sitesrtest/4618599740961579025
#> url category title
#> 1 https://sites.google.com/site/sitesrtest/api-test webpage API Test
#> parent_page_id content_type
#> 1 xhtmlYou can also find this page by its URL or it’s entry ID.
page <- find_content(value_to_match='https://sites.google.com/site/sitesrtest/api-test',
field_to_match='url',
content_category='webpage')
find_content(value_to_match=page$id,
field_to_match='id',
content_category='webpage')
#> id
#> 1 https://sites.google.com/feeds/content/site/sitesrtest/4618599740961579025
#> url category title
#> 1 https://sites.google.com/site/sitesrtest/api-test webpage API Test
#> parent_page_id content_type
#> 1 xhtmlThe find_content() function supports regex-style matching via grep(). If you want to search for all templates on your site, you can just search for “*“.
templates <- find_content(value_to_match='*',
field_to_match='title',
use_regex_matching=TRUE,
content_category='template')
templates
#> id
#> 1 https://sites.google.com/feeds/content/site/sitesrtest/7471740061815467959
#> url
#> 1 https://sites.google.com/site/sitesrtest/config/pagetemplates/no-title-no-sublinks
#> category title parent_page_id content_type
#> 1 webpage|template no-title-no-sublinks xhtmlA nice feature about add_html_page() is that you can specify a template that you would like the page to be created with by providing the template ID. In this example we’ll add the page using the first template we found. This one hides the title and turns off sublinks at the bottom of the page.
sample_html <- system.file("extdata", "example-site", "sample-doc.html", package="googlesites")
add_html_page(page_xhtml_source = sample_html,
page_title = 'Post with GIF',
page_custom_url = 'post-with-gif',
page_template_id = templates$id[1])
#> Creating New Page
#> Successfully Created Page Skeleton
#> Replacing Links to Local Files
#> Uploading Local Files to Sites Page
#>
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#> Successfully Added All Page Content
#> $page_id
#> [1] "https://sites.google.com/feeds/content/site/sitesrtest/2544131551914011893"
#>
#> $page_url
#> [1] "https://sites.google.com/site/sitesrtest/post-with-gif"Once you’ve got pages up and running, it’s easy to programmatically attach content to those pages. In this example, we’re pulling down the RMarkdown cheatsheet from RStudio and attaching it to our “Post with GIF” page. You should see the attachment at the bottom of the page if you have page settings that show attachments. The nice thing about Google Sites is that if you re-upload something with the same name to the same page, it keeps track of it’s revision number so you can always go back and get old versions of a file that you upload.
pdf_cheatsheet <- 'https://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/rmarkdown-cheatsheet-2.0.pdf'
download.file(pdf_cheatsheet, 'rmarkdown-cheatsheet-2.0.pdf', mode="wb")
upload_file_to_site(local_file_path = "rmarkdown-cheatsheet-2,0.pdf",
file_summary = 'R Markdown is an authoring format that makes it
easy to write reusable reports with R. You combine your R code
with narration written in markdown (an easy-to-write plain text format)
and then export the results as an html, pdf, or Word file. You can
even use R Markdown to build interactive documents and slideshows.
Updated 02/16.',
parent_page_id = find_content(value_to_match='Post with GIF',
field_to_match='title')$id)#> $file_id
#> [1] "https://sites.google.com/feeds/content/site/sitesrtest/8473038229992847045"
#>
#> $file_url
#> [1] "https://sites.google.com/site/sitesrtest/post-with-gif/rmarkdown-cheatsheet-2.0.pdf"Of course you can delete content from your site as well. If you don’t want that PDF attachment anymore, then just find it’s ID and remove it. In this example, note the use of the parent_page_id argument so that we don’t accidentally remove the PDF if it exists somewhere else on the site with the same name.
# deleting the attachment
delete_content(id = find_content(value_to_match='rmarkdown-cheatsheet-2.0.pdf',
field_to_match='title',
parent_page_id=find_content(value_to_match='Post with GIF',
field_to_match='title')$id,
content_category='attachment')$id)
#> Content Succesfully Deleted.You can even delete the first sample page we created. We recommend pausing your script in between deletions and insertions because the Sites API is sometimes slow at receiving and reflecting many rapid API calls to change content.
# deleting page
delete_content(id = find_content(value_to_match='API Test',
field_to_match='title')$id)
#> Content Succesfully Deleted.Thats it! You can use these functions to automatically upload content and manage your Google Site. The beautiful thing is that you can version control the contents and repush any content as needed without fussing with the Web UI. It’s recommended that you keep your site files all in one folder so you can keep track of them all. There is an example site folder bundled with the package and available here.