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Structuring an API Project in R

Jamie Owen begins a series on building APIs as R packages:

At Jumping Rivers we were recently tasked with taking a prototype application built in {shiny} to a public facing production environment for a public sector organisation. During the scoping exercise it was determined that a more appropriate solution to fit the requirements was to build the application with a {plumber} API providing the interface to the Bayesian network model and other application tools written in R.

When building applications in {shiny} we have for some time been using the “app as a package” approach which has been popularised by tools like {golem} and {leprechaun}, in large part due to the convenience that comes with leveraging the testing and dependency structure that our R developers are comfortable with in authoring packages, and the ease with which one can install and run an application in a new environment as a result. For this project we looked to take some of these ideas to a {plumber} application. This blog post discusses some of the thoughts and resultant structure that came as a result of that process.

Read on for the first post in the series, dealing with some of the prep work.