The R journal website is published using github pages. This makes it easier to manage the articles in git, and the website automatically updated when the git repo is pushed to github.
The master branch is the sandbox. It is automatically served at https://rjournal.github.io/ as GitHub pages, and an update is triggered at every push so the site can be previewed prior to merging with the deploy branch.
The official website https://journal.r-project.org/ is synchronised (cron job) by the Vienna team from the deploy branch of this repository, which is in turn generated by a GitHub Action from the published branch on push. Therefore one can consider the master branch as development and merging it into published starts the deployment to the official site.
You'll need to install the rjtools package:
install.packages("rjtools",,
c("https://rforge.net","https://cloud.R-project.org"))
Then to create the site use
rmarkdown::render_site()
and the result will be in the _web directory.
FIXME: this section needs to be updated - generally, the rj package should be used for this.