Error message when trying to build website using distill: invalid version specification

Question

I have a distill website. When I try to hit "Build Website" using RStudio I get this error message:

Error: invalid version specification '2021.09.0+351' Execution halted

Exited with status 1.

Answer 1

Both issues are already fixed in development version of distill. It was previously found by us or reported in Github Issues. Don't hesitate to look there when you have trouble, and also test the development v

This issue

Error: invalid version specification 

is caused when you used the last RStudio IDE version.

The blank page issue is caused when using last rmarkdown version.

We'll make a patch release to CRAN very soon, but in the meantime, please install the development version of distill

remotes::install_github("rstudio/distill")

Answer 2

It is not a fully satisfactory answer, but I faced the same issue. Running:

rmarkdown::render_site(encoding = 'UTF-8') 

on a terminal/command line window does run the command fully. However, the site is created only with blank pages (even though if you check the html source, the page is there, hidden).

I'm tracing the blank pages to the upgrade of the rmarkdown package, in my case, from 2.8 to 2.11. This brings with it a new dependency of jquerylib which might be a cause of this as well. This has started to happen with the new version of RStudio 2021.09.0 Build 351. This is consistent with the error message you and I got.

I tried to downgrade rmarkdown but every time you knit from RStudio with that version, it forces the upgrade. I think this should be reported as a bug, as it was clearly working before and now there are several issues that all seemed to be linked with all the upgrades (not compiling from inside RStudio, compiling with blank pages).

(I would have added this as a comment rather than a solution, but I do not have enough reputation yet)