boxr: A high-level R interface for the box.com API

Authentication

To use boxr, you will need to use a Box-app. You can think of a Box-app as the door through which the boxr functions will access Box.

tl;dr

If you have access to client_id and client_secret for a Box-app, you can use box_auth() to authenticate:

box_auth(client_id = "your_client_id", client_secret = "your_client_secret")

This will kick off a process that, all being well, will keep you authenticated for the rest of the R session. By saving this information to your .Renviron file, at your next R session you can use:

box_auth()

If you don’t have access to client_id and client_secret for a Box-app, read on.

More information

There are two different types of apps, as described in this overview article:

Interactive-App: For interactive use on your local computer, this should be the first choice for most situations.
Service-App: For unattended use, e.g. running scheduled reports.

Basic operations

Functions that operate on Box files or folders have arguments: file_id or dir_id. You can use the box.com web interface to find these values. Although they look like numbers, it is perhaps simpler to think of them as character strings:

Files

Folders

Here are a few of this package’s functions:

box_dl(file_id) and box_ul(file = 'path/to/file') to download and upload files
box_setwd()/box_getwd() to get/set a default box folder
box_load()/box_save() for remote R workspaces
box_read() to read files straight into R (e.g. CSV or Excel files as data.frame)
box_source() to read and execute remote code
box_write() to write R objects to Box files
box_search() to query files stored on Box
box_add_description() add text descriptions to your Box files

Directory-wide operations

Cloud storage services can complement version control systems for code, which aren’t well suited to large binary files (e.g. databases, .RData, or heaps of pdfs). box explicitly versions binary files, keeping old ones, and making it easy fall back to an older copy.

boxr provides git style facilities to upload, download, and synchronize the contents of entire local and remote directories. At the time of writing, the box.com API does not support this directly, and so boxr recursively loops through directory structures.

box_push() will update the remote directory with new/changed local files
box_fetch() will update the local directory with new/changed remote files

These functions all have overwrite and delete parameters, which are set to FALSE by default.

Disclaimer: box.com is no replacement for a VCS/remote-database, and familiar verbs are no guarantee of expected behavior! Do check the function documentation before jumping in.

Piping

boxr’s functions have been designed to be ‘pipeable’. Here’s a little example:

library(boxr)
library(dplyr)
library(magrittr)

# 'nycflights13.json' is the same as nycflights13::flights, if you want to
# follow along at home

box_auth()

box_search("nycflights13.json") %>%                # Find a remote file
  box_read() %>%                                   # Download it as a data.frame
    group_by(origin, dest, month) %>%              #   Do some, er, cutting edge
    summarise(mu = mean(arr_delay), n = n()) %>%   #   analysis with dplyr!
  box_write("delay_summary.xlsx") %>%              # Convert to .xlsx, upload
  box_add_description("Check out these averages!") # Add a description to your file!