maRio

• I want to use R to its advantages (data manipulation, modeling, viz, etc.) and then host my work on a website.
• I want to do this without recreating my work in JS plotting libraries.
• Plumber can be used to create REST API endpoints out of R objects/functions to be called from my website.

API Configuration

• This API will be hosted as a single backend service for all of my projects
• It is necessary to programmatically set up Plumber as a mounted router due to all the different endpoints to manage

mario
|   plumber.R (root router)
|   
|└──project_1
|   │   plot.R (endpoints defined here)
|
|└──project_2
|   │   plot.R (endpoints defined here)

Hosting

• Plumber has integrations with DigitalOcean but building a Docker image allows for more flexibility in hosting options
• Heroku is free (with caveats) so I have Dockerized the API, hosted it as a Heroku app, & integrated it into my Express app
• Travis CI is then set up to automatically re-build the hosted API whenever I push changes to the master branch