Building Bookdown to HTML loses styled formatting

Question

I have a large Bookdown document that I want to host on a website as an HTML file. I use bookdown::gitbook to build into a website and the local preview looks fine. However, when I host the html files in the website, they seem to lose the HTML styling and look pretty bad. Any workaround to this?

EDITED: Adding the yaml at the beginning of my Index.Rmd file:

   --- 
    title: "Team Documentation"
    author: "Maxx"
    date: "Updated on `r Sys.Date()`"
    knit: "bookdown::render_book"
    site: bookdown::bookdown_site
    bibliography: [book.bib]
    biblio-style: apalike
    link-citations: yes
    colorlinks: yes
    lot: yes
    lof: yes
    fontsize: 13pt
    monofontoptions: "Scale=0.7"
    description: "This is a collection of commonly used information and how-to documents"
    output:
      bookdown::gitbook:
        self_contained: true
        css: css/style.css
        split_by: section+number
        config:
          toc:
            collapse: section
            before: |
              <li><a href="./index.html">Documentation</a></li>
            after: null
          toolbar:
            position: fixed
          edit: null
          download: null
          search: yes
          sharing: false
          info: yes
      bookdown::html_book:
        css: css/toc.css
    ---

Answer 1

Arrived at a solution: Smashing the Bookdown Gitbook into a single self-contained html file to host on a static site was causing badness + extra maintenance steps, so I ended up ditching the static site and hosting as an Azure app service site instead. My steps:

1. Set up an Azure app service site
2. Create a Bitbucket repo
3. Build Bookdown Gitbook from R as normal (that is, as separate html pages as per intended use, not self-contained)
4. Push Bookdown html files + css file to Bitbucket repo
5. Connect Bitbucket repo to Azure app service & deploy
6. There was one issue with the deployment, which the commands from this question helped resolve: https://stackoverflow.com/a/62016237/314763

This solution offers these advantages:

• Pushing the Bookdown files to Bitbucket is simple in that it can be automated with Git
• Azure app service can have authentication added to it, which is a perk for my team

I hope this is helpful to others as well.