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

1. ‘Create an app’

At https://app.box.com/developers, click ‘My Apps’ in the top right-hand corner, log in, and create a new ‘app’ for your box.com account. You can call it anything you like. This won’t do anything remotely like creating an app, but it does allow you to access your account via the API.

2. Set OAuth2 Parameters

On the next screen, you’ll want to set Content API Access Only, and http://localhost as your redirect_uri as in the screenshot below.

Setting OAuth2.0 parameters

3. Connect boxr to your account

This means passing your client_id and client_secret to the box_auth function. These strings are not enough for someone to access your account maliciously. However, it’s still a good idea to keep them safe, and out of any files or code which might be shared with others.

Run:

library(boxr)
box_auth()

And paste/type the client_id and client_secret when prompted. If these are valid, a browser window should open, for you to formally grant yourself access to your files at box.com.

4. And you’re done

If box_auth() worked successfully, you won’t need to do any of this again, and thanks to the magic of httr everything should just work. Your client_id and client_secret will be securely stored in your R environment variables, your hashed OAuth2.0 token will stored at ~/.boxr-oauth, .gitignore’d if necessary, and automatically refreshed when needed.

Basic Operations

Aside from file upload/download, boxr provides functions which mirror base R operations for local files.

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

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.

Synch a whole directory!

• 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 ‘pipable’. 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!
  

File/Folder IDs

Are how box.com identifies things. You can find them in an item’s URL:

Finding file and folder ids

Verbosity

boxr is by default rather verbose, printing status to the console with cat. This is ‘rude’ package behaviour, and may cause unwanted output if used in conjunction with the excellent knitr package.

To supress messages produced using cat, set boxr’s verbose option with:

options(boxr.verbose = FALSE)

Alternatives

boxr aims to expedite data analysis/communication/distribution. Other ways to manipulate a box.com account include:

• The box desktop app
• The other boxr, written in Ruby. It’s motivations are rather different, and it covers 100% of the box.com API (e.g account administration, etc.)
• box themselves provide a wide range of SDKs, including one for Python

Managing your client id & secret

If you don’t like the idea of typing credentials into your console, you can put them straight into ~/.Renviron yourself, prior to the R session:

BOX_CLIENT_ID="youridhere"
BOX_CLIENT_SECRET="yoursecrethere"
 

(Note the final blank line).