How to convert R Markdown to HTML? I.e., What does “Knit HTML” do in Rstudio 0.96?

Question

What commands are run when pressing \"Knit HTML\" on an R Markdown file in Rstudio 0.96?

My motivation is that I might want to run the same command

Answer 1

Very easy command line method from knitr in a knutshell:

R -e "rmarkdown::render('knitr_example.Rmd')"

This requires rmarkdown to be installed with install.packages(rmarkdown) and that pandoc is installed (apparently it comes with Rstudio, see knitr in a knutshell for more details).

So far when I've used this it nicely puts all the plots in the HTML file rather than as images in a figure directory and cleans up any intermediate files, if any; just like compilation in RStudio does.