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.

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).