Cloud Collaboration with Crunch
Crunch.io provides a cloud-based data store and analytic engine. It has a web client for interactive data exploration and visualization. The crunch package for R allows analysts to interact with and manipulate Crunch datasets from within R. Importantly, this allows technical researchers to collaborate naturally with team members, managers, and clients who prefer a point-and-click interface: because all connect to the same dataset in the cloud, there is no need to email files back and forth continually to share results.
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crunch can be installed from CRAN with
install.packages("crunch")
The pre-release version of the package can be pulled from GitHub using the devtools package:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("Crunch-io/rcrunch", build_vignettes=TRUE)
crunch requires R version 3.0 or greater. Note that if you're on Ubuntu, particularly older versions, you'll need to add an alternative PPA before trying to apt-get install R. For 12.04 Precise, for example,
# apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E084DAB9
# echo "deb http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu precise/" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# apt-get update
# apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev
# sudo apt-get install r-base r-base-dev
See https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/README for more details.
Connecting to Crunch and working with datasets is simple:
$ R
> library(crunch)
> login("[email protected]")
Crunch password for [email protected]:
You are now logged into Crunch as [email protected]
[crunch] >
...
Check out listDatasets() to see the names of your existing datasets, which you can load like ds <- loadDataset("The name of my dataset"). New Crunch datasets can be made from a data.frame with newDataset(), or from a .csv or .sav file with newDatasetFromFile(). See the help for these functions or vignette("getting-started", package="crunch") for more information.
You can set several parameters in your .Rprofile to simplify your workflow:
crunch.emailandcrunch.pw: you can save your Crunch credentials so that you don't have to enter them each time. I.e., you can just> login(). Please be advised of the risks of storing your password like this. See?loginfor more information. Also, note that you can opt to store just yourcrunch.emailand enter your password each time you log in--a mix of convenience and security.crunch.api: if not defined, it defaults to "https://app.crunch.io/api/", the production server. To specify a different location, either set it in your .Rprofile or after loading thecrunchpackage, do> options(crunch.api="https://otherapi.crunch.io/api/").
See the contribution guidelines.
# make deps
# make test
This installs dependencies and then runs the tests, which installs crunch from your local checkout in the process. If the dependencies fail to install, check the error message. You may need to install libcurl on your system before installing the R packages.
$ make test is all you need. Requires the testthat package for R. You can also specify a specific test file or files to run by adding a "file=" argument, like $ make test file=auth. test_package will do a regular-expression pattern match within the file names. See its documentation in the testthat package.
Testing has two options: unit tests only, and tests that communicate with an API server. This is governed by an environment variable, INTEGRATION. This is false by default, meaning that API integration tests are not run. To modify this and test against the Crunch API, you can run $ export INTEGRATION=TRUE && make test.
To run integration tests, you will need to specify a test user, password, and API server to communicate with, either by editing tests/testthat/helper.R or by setting test.user, test.pw, and test.api in your .Rprofile, as in:
options(test.user="[email protected]",
test.pw="t0pSecretP@ssw0rD",
test.api="https://app.crunch.io/api/")
or, if you prefer, you can set the environment variables R_TEST_USER, R_TEST_PW, and R_TEST_API.
If you are a Crunch developer serving a version of the API/backend with Vagrant, you will have best results if your R_TEST_API/test.api (1) is local.crunch.io, thanks to a mapping of localhost to that in your hosts file, and (2) you use http rather than https in order to avoid certificate errors. You might point at "http://local.crunch.io:8080/api/", for example. Some tests that cannot run successfully in the Vagrant environment will be skipped when run against a local.crunch.io URL.
Run $ make doc. Requires the roxygen2 package.