Orderly supports a centralised workflow, where a central server holds the canonical version of a report. In order to make this workflow work, we need a number of things:

• To be able to run a report on a central server
• To be able to get copies of reports from the central server in order to use them as dependencies of locally run reports
• To be able to share these centrally run reports with someone

To make this workflow work, we have developed some additional software.

First, we have a docker-based server system called OrderlyWeb which can be deployed onto a server. We will communicate with this server over https using a package orderlyweb which will follow orderly onto CRAN.

OrderlyWeb

The OrderlyWeb server software provides a number of things

1. A persistent copy of R running orderly that can run reports as needed using the orderly::orderly_runner function
2. A web server that exposes a user-friendly web portal showing versions of orderly reports and an http api (this application is written in Kotlin)
3. A reverse proxy used to secure the application with https

A diagram may help show how the pieces fit together

Getting OrderlyWeb installed requires a little work, and you will need access to an appropriate server running docker, our python-based deployment tool, and TLS certificates for the server that you are using. We recommend using vault for storing certificates and any secrets used in deployment.

OrderlyWeb will use GitHub for authentication, the setup for which is described here.

Configuring orderly to talk to OrderlyWeb

Once OrderlyWeb is running, we can tell orderly about it by adding an appropriate setting to the orderly_config.yml file. For example, if you had one testing and one production instance

remote:
  testing:
    driver: orderlyweb::orderlyweb_remote
    args:
      host: testing.example.com
      port: 443
      token: $GITHUB_TOKEN
  production:
    driver: orderlyweb::orderlyweb_remote
    args:
      host: production.example.com
      port: 443
      token: $GITHUB_TOKEN

where $GITHUB_TOKEN is an environment variable that holds a GitHub token with “user” scope. The testing remote is listed first, and so will be the default one used in any remote-using command.

Interacting with the remote server

Several commands can interact with the remote server:

• orderly::orderly_run_remote will run a report on a remote server, committing it immediately. This will save the log alongside the report.
• orderly::orderly_pull_archive will pull a version of a report from a remote server
• orderly::orderly_pull_dependencies will pull all the dependencies of a report from the remote server (i.e., versions of reports declared in the depends: section of a report)

Future developments

We hope that this system will become easier to deploy in future. We use it internally on two projects with orderly archives that hold gigabytes of analyses, and it has evolved to meet our needs. If you think it might work for you but can't get started, please get in touch.