I have an R Notebook that I am building to provide an analysis for somebody, and I am wondering if I should choose another option as I don't know if she will be able to run the Notebook without having R installed.
Is it possible to run an R Notebook as a single entity or must you have R installed in order to do it?
To rerun the notebook they require R. But the whole point of R Notebooks is that they produce a static document as output. That document (usually in HTML format) can be shared in isolation, and does not require any additional software besides a web browser to be viewerd.
Notebook will need R to run. To distribute a notebook without the R dependency will be a bit more elaborate, like installing rstudio server within a docker container. User will, in this particular case, need to have Docker installed and know how to start a container. From there on the user can interact with the code through a web browser.
Another option would be to use the cloud solution that some companies offer. It offers sharing functionality and you don't have to worry about the infrastructure or distribution of your work. There are some free plans that may work for you, but the real power is in premium features.
Related
I've some shiny app and I want to execute and to make it standalone application (it will be awesome if it will open via chrome).
I can't upload the app to the Net and I want that also co-workers without R studio or R
will use this app.
because of the security company - I can't download any software except R packages.
I saw here a few solution, but all of them included any software download.
I have done some research on this issue. The commenters are basically correct: you need the R binaries in some way, either a portable R or an R server. But there are solutions that allow it to bundle those with your code and hide the details from your users.
On option is to wrap your app along with
a portable R into a container application like Electron. The electron-quick-start project tries this.
The RInno package provides functions to bundle your app and R portable into an installer app. Every user runs the installer on their system once which will install your app, the packages and the code. But in the end users may not see the difference to other apps. They get a link in the start menu and that's it. I did that successfully. But it did not work out of the box. I had to adjust the output manually in several places.
A second container solution works with docker. That is what ShinyProxy does. See also this blog.
The package shinyShortcut (I quote) "will produce an executable file that runs the shiny app directly in the user's default browser".
Important to note: I haven't tested most of them. From reviewing the solutions I often get the feeling that these solutions might make releases somewhat complicated because there are always manual steps involved.
An analytic task has been given to me to solve it by python and return back the result to the technical staff. I was asked to prepare the result in a jupyter notebook and such that the resulting code would be fully runnable and documented.
Honestly, I just started using jupyter notebook and generally found it pretty useful and convenient in generating reports integrated with codes and figures. But I had to go into some level of difficulty when I wanted to use specific packages like graphviz and dtreeviz, which was beyond doing a simple pip install xxx.
So, how should I make sure that my code is runnable when I do not know what packages are available at the destination Jupyter notebook of the next guy who wants to run it or when they want to run it using a Jupiter Lab? especially regarding these particular packages!
One solution for you problem would be to use docker to develop and deploy your project.
You can define all your dependencies, create your project and build a docker image with them. With this image, you can be sure that anyone who is using it, will have the same infrastructure like yours.
It shouldn't take you a lot of time to learn docker and it will help you in the future.
I have two different versions of R installed, one which is up to date and which I use for all my regular R coding (needs to be up to date so that I can use various updated and new packages) and one which I use to access OLAP cubes (needs to be the R Client from Microsoft, because this is the only one which supports the olapR package, and which currently uses R version 3.4.3).
Since, in theory, I only have to access the OLAP cube once a month, I "outsourced" this task to a different RStudio project, in which I download and save the required data for all other projects. Hence, all other projects never require the olapR package to be installed and can and will be run in the up to date R version.
Now, ideally I would like to link my R version to my projects, so that I do not have to change my global R version and restart RStudio every time I access the OLAP cube or work on this data retrieval project (and then switch it back). However, I could not find any options in RStudio to achieve this result.
There are a few threads out there describing the same problem, but with no satisfactory answer in my opinion:
https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/200657296-Link-Project-and-R-Version
Rstudio project using different version of R
I also tried looking for a different package than olapR but with similar functionality, but could not find anything except X4R, which seems outdated and does not work for me (https://github.com/overcoil/X4R). Sadly, I am also unable to directly access the databases which the OLAP cube uses for its results, so I cannot go "around" it.
I am happy for any help or suggestions you can offer, whether it is a general workaround to link a project to a specific R version or the (less helpful for the community) solution of accessing the OLAP cube in a different way.
Thanks in advance!
Using the answer from MrGumble I created a .bat file that will execute my .R file using the desired R installation. Even though it is not the answer I thought I would get, I think it is an even better solution to the problem.
For all facing a similar issue, here is the .bat file (never created one before, so also had to google how to do it and I guess some might be in the same position):
#echo off
title Getting data for further processing in R
echo Retrieving OLAP data
echo.
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft\R Client\R_SERVER\bin\Rscript.exe" "C:\Users\me\Documents\Projects\!Data\script.R"
echo.
echo Saved data
echo.
pause
Thanks again to MrGumble for his help.
Skip RStudio.
RStudio is really just an editor (albeit powerful and useful) editor, which starts an R console for you (and the surrounding PATH variables, library locations, etc.).
If your monthly task only requires you to run the R-script (or a bit of interactive work), you can simply execute your preferred version of R from the command line and have it run your R script. E.g.
C:\Users\me>"C:\Program Files (x64)\Microsoft R\bin\Rscript" myscript.R
You might have to define some PATH variables so that the older R doesn't look for packages in the newer R's libraries, but that depends entirely on your current setup.
I have a Jupyter Notebook that plots some data and lets the user interact with it via a slider.
What would be the easiest way to make a web app with a similar functionality? (reusing as much of the code...)
I believe the easiest way is to use voilà.
After installing you just have to run:
voila <path-to-notebook> <options>
And you will have a server running your notebook as a web app, with all the input code omitted.
AppMode is "A Jupyter extension that turns notebooks into web applications".
From the README:
Appmode consist of a server-side and a notebook extension for Jupyter.
Together these two extensions provide the following features:
One can view any notebook in appmode by clicking on the Appmode button in the toolbar. Alternatively one can change the url from
baseurl/notebooks/foo.ipynb to baseurl/apps/foo.ipynb. This also
allows for direct links into appmode.
When a notebook is opened in appmode, all code cells are automatically executed. In order to present a clean UI, all code cells
are hidden and the markdown cells are read-only.
A notebook can be opened multiple times in appmode without interference. This is achieved by creating temporary copies of the
notebook for each active appmode view. Each appmode view has its
dedicated ipython kernel. When an appmode page is closed the kernel is
shutdown and the temporary copy gets removed.
To allow for passing information between notebooks via url parameters, the current url is injected into the variable
jupyter_notebook_url.
To be complete - there exists also https://www.streamlit.io/ .
I still dont understand the exact difference between voila and streamlit.
At the moment I just struggle with the possibility to re-run everything with new parameters... I have bad luck with voila still.
Edit: I see that streamlit requires a raw python, not .ipynb, this fact would mean that this answer is completely wrong, I will search a bit more on streamlit before further action/comment.
Edit2: Voila looks great. However, I found few things that uncover the underlying complexity and thus a troubles that may arise.
callbacks. Widgets work great in jupyter, but since it is not possible to re-run one cell, sometimes the logic must be modified to work in Voila.
interactive java objects need a special treatment, e.g. matplotlib has a cheap solution, but there was nothing for e.g. jsroot
links. It is easy to create (a file and) a download link in jupyter, Voila can also serve a file, but it needs another extra treatment.
After all, I pose myself a question - is it better to learn many tricks and modifications to jupyter or to use some other system? I am going to see if streamlit can give em some answer.
The Jupyter Dashboards Bundlers extension from the Jupyter Incubator is one way to do it while retaining interactivity.
EDIT: While pip installing this package will also install the cms package dependency, like dashboard_bundlers, cms needs to be explicitly enabled/quick-setup as a notebook extension for the dashboard tools to work.
#raphaelts has the right idea and should be the accepted answer. As of Dec 2019, Voila is the most appropriate method to deploy Jupyter notebooks to production as a stand alone webapp. Think internal datascience teams sharing their analytics workload with internal C-Suite teams using SPA stlye Notebooks with all the code hidden and custom GUI/interactions thrown in. Recently discussed on HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160634 and the official announcement from the Jupyter maintainer https://blog.jupyter.org/and-voil%C3%A0-f6a2c08a4a93enter link description here
As mentioned above, voilà is a very powerful tool which hides the input cells from your notebooks and therefore provides a clean interface. In order to deploy your notebook with voilà you need to follow the specific steps of your organization. But if you want to quickly run it on your machine, simply install it with pip install voila. Then you can enter start from the command-line: voila my_notebook.ipynb or use the "Voila" button which should have appeared in your Jupyter notebook.
Note, however, that using voilà is only one part of the story. You also need to build the required interactivity, ie. to set up how to respond to input changes. There are quite a few frameworks for this.
The simplest one is to use the interact function or the observe method from the Ipywidgets library. This is very direct, but things can easily get out of control as you start having more and more widgets and complexity.
There are complete frameworks, some of them mentioned above. E.g. streamlit, dash and holoviz. These are very powerful and suited for larger projects.
But if you want to keep it simple, I also recommend to check out autocalc. It is a very easy-to-use library, which lets you define the dependencies between your widgets/variables and let all the recalculation be triggered automatically. A tutorial can be found here.
Disclaimer: I am the author of the autocalc package.
The easiest way is to use the Mercury framework. You can reuse all your code. To convert the notebook to web app you will need to add the YAML header in the first cell of the notebook (very similar to R Markdown). The widgets are generated based on YAML. The end-user can tweak widgets values and click the Run button to execute the notebook from the top to the bottom. You can easily hide the notebook's code (if you want) by setting the show-code: False in the YAML. The example notebook and corresponding web app are below.
Example of the notebook with YAML header
Example web app generated from notebook with Mercury
i've been getting up to speed using R of late, and am wondering what the most efficient way is to clone an RStudio environment, especially the package installations, from one machine to another. i'd like to be able to switch from my desktop machine to my laptop, but i am adding packages very frequently to the desktop as i work and would like a simple way to make sure the same packages get installed on the laptop.
any help much appreciated
ps. not everything i'm installing is from CRAN...some are packages taken from github
If you have more than a couple of machine to maintain with the same R configuration, I think you should consider setting up your own local R repository.
And I will just redirect you to another SO question here:
Creating a local R package repository
You can also find the most useful information in the R manual.
Once this is done, you just have to update the local R repository and the packages will be updated on all machines, Windows or Unix
You can just copy and paste the folders in the R libraries between machines. As long as it is the same operating system on both machines there should not be any problem. If you want it to be automatically synchronised then place the R libraries into something like dropbox so that adding or updating a package will automatically appear on either machine with the next sync.