devd : Install, Start and Stop 'devd' Instances from R

The 'devd' https://github.com/cortesi/devd utility is "a web daemon for developers". It is written in the 'Go' programming language and distributed in both source and statically-linked, zero-dependency binary form. It's more lightweight than 'node.js' or 'Python' equivalents and designed to support front-end development tasks. It is a good companion for developing 'htmlwidgets' or other web-content.

The intent of this package is meant to make it dirt simple to fire up a simple web server in the backround along with a bona-fide system web browser from R (i.e. no need to even use the RStudio new built-in terminal) and also get access to the access log from it.

A primary use-case is to use R to generate data for interactive D3 visualizations (not the htmlwidget kind, but one-off, special-purpose ones) and also use RStudio for editing the HTML/CSS/JS resources (RStudio R Projects are great ways to keep web projects organized).

It's also handy when doing something like the above and also want to test it with someting like fiery as a back-end API.

The following functions are implemented:

• devd_log: Retrieve current "access log" buffer
• devd_start: Start up a devd process
• devd_stop: Stop a running devd process
• install_devd: Install devd server for your platform
• remove_devd: Remove all sysetm traces of devd installed/created by this package

Installation / Usage

devtools::install_github("r-pkgs/processx")
devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/devd")

library(devd)

install_devd() # only need to do this once

dd <- devd_start()

devd_log(dd) # see the access log since last time `devd_log(dd)` was called

devd_stop(dd)

remove_devd() # if you want to get rid of anything the package installed/created