plumber R Package Documentation

You can install the stable version from CRAN or the development version from GitHub.

CRAN (Stable):

install.packages("plumber")

GitHub (Development):

pak::pkg_install("rstudio/plumber")
library(plumber)

To host your API, use the pr() function to load your decorated R script and pr_run() to start the server on a specified port.

Example using a file named plumber.R:

library(plumber)
pr("plumber.R") %>%
  pr_run(port=8000)

Once running, endpoints can be accessed via HTTP methods (GET, POST, etc.) using a browser, curl, or other HTTP clients.

You can configure plumber to serve static files from a directory by defining specific paths. You can use the default path (typically /public) or define an explicit path (e.g., /static). Once configured, files located in your local directory (such as ./files) will be accessible via the corresponding URL paths.

# Example access patterns:
http://localhost:8000/static/b.txt
http://localhost:8000/public/a.html

Plumber allows you to turn R functions into API endpoints by decorating them with roxygen2-like comments. Use the #* prefix for these decorators (rather than #' to avoid collisions with roxygen2).

Common decorators include:

• @get /path: Defines a GET endpoint.
• @post /path: Defines a POST endpoint.
• @param name description: Defines an input parameter.
• @serializer type: Defines how the response is serialized (e.g., png, json).

Request parameters (from query strings or POST bodies) are forwarded to the R function as arguments.

#* Echo back the input
#* @param msg The message to echo
#* @get /echo
function(msg="") {
  list(msg = paste0("The message is: '", msg, "'"))
}