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plumber

An API Generator for R

Gives the ability to automatically generate and serve an HTTP API from R functions using the annotations in the R documentation around your functions.

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Plumber allows you to create a web API by merely decorating your existing R source code with special comments. Take a look at an example.

# plumber.R
 
#* Echo back the input
#* @param msg The message to echo
#* @get /echo
function(msg=""){
  list(msg = paste0("The message is: '", msg, "'"))
}
 
#* Plot a histogram
#* @png
#* @get /plot
function(){
  rand <- rnorm(100)
  hist(rand)
}
 
#* Return the sum of two numbers
#* @param a The first number to add
#* @param b The second number to add
#* @post /sum
function(a, b){
  as.numeric(a) + as.numeric(b)
}

These comments allow plumber to make your R functions available as API endpoints. You can use either #* as the prefix or #', but we recommend the former since #' will collide with Roxygen.

> r <- plumb("plumber.R")  # Where 'plumber.R' is the location of the file shown above
> r$run(port=8000)

You can visit this URL using a browser or a terminal to run your R function and get the results. For instance http://localhost:8000/plot will show you a histogram, and http://localhost:8000/echo?msg=hello will echo back the 'hello' message you provided.

Here we're using curl via a Mac/Linux terminal.

$ curl "http://localhost:8000/echo"
 {"msg":["The message is: ''"]}
$ curl "http://localhost:8000/echo?msg=hello"
 {"msg":["The message is: 'hello'"]}

As you might have guessed, the request's query string parameters are forwarded to the R function as arguments (as character strings).

$ curl --data "a=4&b=3" "http://localhost:8000/sum"
 [7]

You can also send your data as JSON:

$ curl --data '{"a":4, "b":5}' http://localhost:8000/sum
 [9]

Installation

You can install the latest stable version from CRAN using the following command:

install.packages("plumber")

If you want to try out the latest development version, you can install it from GitHub. The easiest way to do that is by using devtools.

library(devtools)
install_github("trestletech/plumber")
library(plumber)

Hosting

If you're just getting started with hosting cloud servers, the DigitalOcean integration included in plumber will be the best way to get started. You'll be able to get a server hosting your custom API in just two R commands. Full documentation is available at https://www.rplumber.io/docs/digitalocean/.

A couple of other approaches to hosting plumber are also made available:

Related Projects

  • OpenCPU - A server designed for hosting R APIs with an eye towards scientific research.
  • jug - (development discontinued) an R package similar to Plumber but uses a more programmatic approach to constructing the API.

Provenance

plumber was originally released as the rapier package and has since been renamed (7/13/2015).

News

plumber 0.4.6

  • BUGFIX: Hooks that accept a value argument (postroute, preserialize, and postserialize) now modify the incoming value as documented.
  • BUGFIX: The postserialize hook is now given the serialized data as its value parameter.
  • BUGFIX: properly handle cookie expiration values (#216).
  • Add support for tags in Swagger docs (#230).
  • Optional swaggerCallback parameter for run() to supply a callback function for reporting the url for swagger page.
  • Add RStudio Project Template to package

plumber 0.4.4

  • Support Expiration, HTTPOnly, and Secure flags on cookies (#87). EDIT: see #216 which prevented expiration from working.
  • BUGFIX: properly handle named query string and post body arguments in mounted subrouters.
  • Added support for static sizing of images. @png and @jpeg now accept a parenthetical list of arguments that will be passed into the png() or jpeg() call. This enables annotations like #' @png (width = 200, height=500).
  • Enable ByteCompile flag
  • Set working directory for DigitalOcean APIs.
  • Respect setErrorHandler
  • BUGFIX: export PlumberStatic
  • Case-insensitive matching on plumber.r and entrypoint.r when plumb()ing a directory.
  • Support query strings with keys that appear more than once (#165)
  • Fix the validation error warning at the bottom of deployed Swagger files which would have appeared any time your swagger.json file was hosted in such a way that a hosted validator service would not have been able to access it. For now we just suppress validation of swagger.json files. (#149)
  • Support for floating IPs in DNS check that occurs in do_configure_https()
  • Make adding swap file idempotent in do_provision() so you can now call that on a single droplet multiple times.
  • Support an exit hook which can define a function that will be evaluated when the API is interrupted. e.g. pr <- plumb("plumber.R"); pr$registerHook("exit", function(){ print("Bye bye!") })
  • Fixed bug in which a single function couldn't support multiple paths for a single verb (#203).
  • Support negative numbers in numeric path segments (#212)
  • Support . in string path segments

plumber 0.4.2

  • Development version for 0.4.2. Will be working to move to even/odd release cycles, but I had prematurely bumped to 0.4.0 so that one might get skipped, making the next CRAN release 0.4.2.

plumber 0.4.0

  • BREAKING: Listen on localhost instead of listening publicly by default.
  • BREAKING: We no longer set the Access-Control-Allow-Origin HTTP header to *. This was previously done for convenience but we've decided to prioritize security here by removing this default. You can still add this header to any route you want to be accessible from other origins.
  • BREAKING: Listen on a random port by default instead of always on 8000. This can be controlled using the port parameter in run(), or by setting the plumber.port option.
  • BREAKING: Removed PlumberProcessor class and replaced with a notion of hooks. See registerHook and registerHooks on the Plumber router.
  • BREAKING: addGlobalProcessor method on Plumber routers now takes a list which are added as hooks instead of a Processor. Note that sessionCookie has also been updated to behave accordingly, meaning that the convention of pr$addGlobalProcessor(sessionCookie("secret", "cookieName")) will continue to work for this release.
  • BREAKING: sessionCookie now returns a list instead of a Processor. Note that addGlobalProcessor has also been updated to behave accordingly, meaning that the convention of pr$addGlobalProcessor(sessionCookie("secret", "cookieName")) will continue to work for this release.
  • DEPRECATION: Deprecated the addAssets method on Plumber routers. Use PlumberStatic and the mount method to attach a static router.
  • DEPRECATION: Deprecated the addEndpoint method in favor of the handle method for Plumber routers. Removed support for the processors, params, and comments parameters are no longer supported.
  • DEPRECATION: Deprecated the addFilter method on Plumber routers in favor of the new filter method. Removed support for the processor parameter.
  • DEPRECATION: Deprecated the addGlobalProcessor method on Plumber routers.
  • The undocumented setDefaultErrorHandler method on Plumber routers now takes a function that returns the error handler function. The top-level function takes a single param named debug which is managed by the debug parameter in the run() method.
  • Added support for OPTIONS HTTP requests via the @options annotation.
  • Add support for entrypoint.R when plumb()ing a directory. If this file exists, it is expected to return a Plumber router representing the API contained in this directory. If it doesn't exist, the behavior is unaltered. If both plumber.R and entrypoint.R exist, entrypoint.R takes precedence.
  • plumb() the current directory by default if no arguments are provided.
  • Added a debug parameter to the run method which can be set to TRUE in order to get more insight into your API errors.

plumber 0.3.3

  • plumb() now accepts an argument dir, referring to a directory containing plumber.R, which may be provided instead of file.

plumber 0.3.2

  • Introduced the do_provision(), do_deploy_api(), do_remove_api() and do_configure_https() functions to provision and manage your APIs on a cloud server running on DigitalOcean.
  • source() the referenced R file to plumb inside of a new environment that inherits directly from the GlobalEnv. This provides more explicit control over exactly how this environment should behave.
  • Added @serializer htmlwidget to support rendering and returning a self-contained htmlwidget from a plumber endpoint.
  • Properly handle cookies with no value. (#88)
  • Don't convert + character in a query string to a space.

plumber 0.3.1

  • Add a method to consume JSON on post (you can still send a query string in the body of a POST request as well).

plumber 0.3.0

  • BREAKING CHANGE: serializer factories are now registered instead of the serializer themselves. Thus, addSerializer() now expects a function that returns a serializer, and Response$new() now expects a serializer itself rather than a character string naming a serializer. Internally it is the serializer itself that is attached to the response rather than the name of the serializer. This allows for a serializer to customize its behavior.
  • Accept an additional argument on the @serializer annotation -- R code that will be passed in as an argument to the serializer factory. See example 09-content-type.

plumber 0.2.4

  • Add a filter which parses and sets req$cookies to be a list corresponding to the cookies provided with the request.
  • Responses can set multiple cookies
  • Bug Fix: convert non-character arguments in setCookie to character before URL- encoding.

plumber 0.2.3

  • Set options(warn=1) during execution of user code so that warnings are immediately visible in the console, rather than storing them until the server is stopped.

plumber 0.2.2

  • Add sessionCookie function to define a processor that can be used as a globalProcessor on a router to encrypt values from req$session and store them as an encrypted cookie in on the user's browser.
  • Added setCookie method to response which (primitively) allows you to set a cookie to be included in the response.
  • Add addGlobalProcessor method on plumber class to support a processor that runs a processor only a single time, before and then after all other filters and the endpoint.
  • Document all public params so CHECK passes

plumber 0.2.1

  • Add more Roxygen documentation for exported functions
  • Remove the warning in the README as the API seems to be stabilizing.

plumber 0.2.0

  • BREAKING: Changed variable-path routing to use bracketed format instead of just a colon.
  • BREAKING: Renamed PlumberRouter R6 object to just Plumber.
  • Support addEndpoint() and addFilter() on the Plumber object.
  • Added support for the #* prefix.

plumber 0.1.0

  • Initial Release

Reference manual

It appears you don't have a PDF plugin for this browser. You can click here to download the reference manual.
install.packages("plumber")

0.4.6 by Jeff Allen, a year ago

https://www.rplumber.io (site) https://github.com/trestletech/plumber (dev)

Report a bug at https://github.com/trestletech/plumber/issues

Browse source code at https://github.com/cran/plumber

Authors: Trestle Technology , LLC [aut] , Jeff Allen [cre] , Frans van Dunné [ctb] , Sebastiaan Vandewoude [ctb] , SmartBear Software [ctb, cph] (swagger-ui)

Documentation:   PDF Manual  

Task views: Web Technologies and Services, Model Deployment with R

MIT + file LICENSE license

Imports R6, stringi, jsonlite, httpuv, crayon

Suggests testthat, XML, rmarkdown, PKI, base64enc, htmlwidgets, visNetwork, analogsea

Imported by rjsonapi.

Suggested by bayesAB, rsconnect.

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