Static file server in R

Plumber, ambiorix, and opencpu are the keys to putting R into production.

Sometimes all an API needs to do is statically serve files. Making a static file server with R is insanely easy.

For this example, I have a folder called /public which I want to serve files from at the API path /static.

To do this we create a plumber API using the pr_static() function or #* @assets if using the other plumber declaration format.

Making the file server

library(plumber)

pr() |>
  pr_static("/static", "./public") |>
  pr_run()

calling the file server

We can call this api using a GET request:

library(httr2)

iris_csv <- request("http://127.0.0.1:3000/static/iris.csv") |>
  req_perform() |>
  resp_body_string()

readr::read_csv(iris_csv)

Alternative plumber format

#* @assets ./public /static
list()