RStudio Connect Git Manifests • accesstocare

Background

Most of the examples in the accesstocare package can be deployed to RStudio Connect by using the RStudio IDE’s button push deployment. All of the examples are designed to be deployed using RStudio Connect’s Git Backed Deployment. This means that we tell RStudio Connect where the code repository exists, and then have RStudio Connect download the latest code everytime the repository is updated.

A major step to accomplish this, is to have a “manifest” file. It contains the metadata of the example, such as package versions, R version, primary file, etc. It is produced using the rsconnect package. In accesstocare, there are two utility functions to make it easier to create the manifest files.

Functions

There are two functions included in accesstocare to help with creating the manifests:

atc_write_manifest() creates the manifest for a single example
atc_write_all_manifests() batch creates all of the manifests

Usage

We will the fs package to make it easy to see the changes in the directories.

library(accesstocare)
library(fs)

For the usage examples, we will copy all of the accesstocare examples into a temporary folder.

temp_folder <- path(tempdir(), "temp")

atc_copy_all_content(temp_folder, silent = TRUE)

Single example

To show how to create the manifest of a single example, we will point to the “flexdashboard” sub-folder. The atc_copy_all_content() command created that sub-folder.

dashboard_path <- path(temp_folder, "flexdashboard")

dir_tree(dashboard_path)

/var/folders/l8/v1ym1mc10_b0dftql5wrrm8w0000gn/T/RtmpBkacCE/temp/flexdashboard
├── access-to-care.Rmd
└── metadata.yml

The folder contains the example, a metadata.yml, and a .gitignore file.

Now, we run create the manifest using atc_write_manifest(). The function will automatically identify the primary document, and process the files listed in.gitignore file.

atc_write_manifest(dashboard_path)

Full path:  /var/folders/l8/v1ym1mc10_b0dftql5wrrm8w0000gn/T/RtmpBkacCE/temp/flexdashboard 
Application files
---  access-to-care.Rmd 
---  metadata.yml 
Primary file: access-to-care.Rmd 
Compiling manifest...
Manifest complete

/var/folders/l8/v1ym1mc10_b0dftql5wrrm8w0000gn/T/RtmpBkacCE/temp/flexdashboard/manifest.json

The manifest.json file is now available in the sub-folder.

dir_tree(dashboard_path)

/var/folders/l8/v1ym1mc10_b0dftql5wrrm8w0000gn/T/RtmpBkacCE/temp/flexdashboard
├── access-to-care.Rmd
├── manifest.json
└── metadata.yml

Batch create all manifests

To create the manifests for all of the sub-folders, use atc_write_all_manifests(). This function will silently run the manifest writer for each sub-folder. For those that it fails for, it skips the creation. The function returns a list object with all of the results. Printing the object on the R Console shows which were skipped, and which were created.

atc_write_all_manifests(temp_folder)

# A tibble: 16 × 2
   content              created
   <chr>                <chr>  
 1 RMarkdown-DataPrep   YES    
 2 RMarkdown-html       YES    
 3 RMarkdown-pdf        YES    
 4 RNotebook            YES    
 5 connectwidgets       YES    
 6 dash                 YES    
 7 flexdashboard        YES    
 8 htmlwidgets          SKIPPED
 9 jupyter              YES    
10 launcher-programatic YES    
11 plot                 SKIPPED
12 plumber-api          YES    
13 powerpoint           YES    
14 powerpoint-state     YES    
15 presentation         YES    
16 shiny                YES