How to render flexdashboard from the command line?

Question

I have a flexdashboard Rmd that renders correctly when i press the Knit button in RStudio. I would like to render it from the command line but the naviagation bar does change when I use the command render("myfile.rmd", flex_dashboard())

The heading of my Rmd file is the following:

---
title: "Flexdashboard"
output: 
  flexdashboard::flex_dashboard:
      theme: cosmo
      navbar:
      - { title: "Draft-For Internal Use Only", align: right }
      source_code: embed
---

Answer 1

You can call render with no arguments and it will pick up all of the options in YAML:

render("myfile.Rmd")

Altons was correct that using flex_dashboard() creates a new format that uses all the defaults. To render a format and keep the settings from YAML you use:

render("myfile.Rmd", "flex_dashboard")

But this latter form is only required if flex_dashboard isn't already the default format within the Rmd.

Answer 2

pass arguments within the flex_dashboard().

For example:

render("myfile.rmd", flex_dashboard(theme=simplex),output='myfile_html')

Answer 3

FWIW, and to prevent people from saying, wait, what's render? Why can't I use knit?.... o ok, so why can't I then use knit2html? These are the steps to render a flexdashboard from the command line:

1. Install Pandoc

2. Close your current cmd if you haven't already.

3. Run this command: "C:\Program Files\R\R-3.2.2\bin\x64\R.exe" -e "rmarkdown::render('C:/FULLPATH/myFlexDashboard.Rmd')"

4. If it works, put that in a .bat file and celebrate!

(for step 3, note the slashes/backslashes... they should be exactly like that, but your R version might be different)