Package has a VignetteBuilder field but no prebuilt vignette index

Question

I am submitting a package to CRAN and I have got the below warning from the reviewers team:

Package has a VignetteBuilder field but no prebuilt vignette index.

that I have in fact seen also when running devtools::release(). I am using the last R version as R version 3.3.1 and have the following .Rmd vignette source:

---
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
output: rmarkdown::html_vignette
vignette: >
  %\VignetteIndexEntry{<my vignette title>} 
  %\VignetteEngine{knitr::knitr}
  %\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
--- 

Moreover, I have included knitr in the DESCRIPTION file as per default:

Suggests:
    knitr
VignetteBuilder:
    knitr

I have looked around and, although the issue seems to be quite common, I have not been able to understand why the index does not build (and how to force build it).

---

This question and links therein are the top google results but do not solve the problem.

Gyro

Do you have no title? And the last line is sometimes %VignetteEncoding{UTF-8} or just \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} – Radioscopy

The title is there (I just didn't include it in the question body) and so is the %VignetteEncoding{UTF-8}. I suppose the problem is elsewhere, it must be in the building properties or the like. – Gyro

I have had the same answer. What was your solution ? – Usa

You might want to check your .Rbuildignore. For me the issue was that I had build included there, which you should not do. – Setose

Answer 1

This requires a build/vignettes.rds or Meta/vignettes.rds file. This file is automatically generated by devtools. Please make sure that you do not delete it or list it in .Rbuildignore (check for a line containing build Meta or ^build/vignettes.rds$ ^Meta/vignettes.rds$ and delete it from the file).

Priapitis

devtools puts those ignores in there. Are you saying that we should remove every time what devtools puts into Rbuildignore? – Undersexed

Answer 2

I had the exact same error. I made the following changes to my package, which had been suggested before, but some in comments, and not with clear verification about what worked and what did not.

First, I made changes to the vignette: specification in the header so that it now reads as follows (note the difference in the encoding specification line, from %\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} to %\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8}, which matches the directions in https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/r-package-vignette.html which seem to have changed)

vignette: >
  %\VignetteIndexEntry{The import package}
  %\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown}
  %\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8}

Without these changes I had problems where I would either get warnings locally or remotely, but this made things more consistent.

Second, and potentially most important, I removed ^build from my .Rbuildignore, importantly, devtools did not add it back, so I wonder if this is some legacy behavior or if I potentially added it myself at some point. I did not remove ^Meta (I tried but devtools added the ignore back).

These changes resolved the note consistently and the package is now released :-)

Media