README.md

In arestrom/repg: Tools for working with PostgreSQL Databases

repg

Overview

This package includes a collection of tools to work with PostgreSQL connections and databases. Connection function requires credentials to be stored in your .Renviron file. This avoids the need to supply usernames or password in code. It also avoids potential for accidentally exposing credentials when sharing code in public repositories.

The idea of storing credentials in the .Renviron file comes from a post by Hadley Wickham: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/httr/vignettes/api-packages.html

Installation

There was a bug in R-3.4.0 that prevented installation of this package. You will need to install R-3.4.1 or higher.

This package also depends on the RPostgres package which is not yet available on CRAN. You will need to install the following from GitHub.

# Install the development versions from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("RcppCore/Rcpp")
devtools::install_github("rstats-db/DBI")
devtools::install_github("rstats-db/RPostgres")
devtools::install_github("arestrom/repg")

Storing connection credentials

In order to use the functions in this package you must store your connection credenials: host_name, username, and password in your .Renviron file. To add these items to your .Renviron file you will first need to create, or locate, your .Renviron file. In your R console, enter:

normalizePath("~/")

The path to your .Renviron file will be displayed. Use RStudio to either create a new .Renviron file if it does not exist, or open the existing .Renviron file from the specified location. A full set of credentials to connect to PostgreSQL should look similar to:

my_pg_host_aws=ec2-66-666-666-66.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com
my_pg_username_aws=super_secret_user
my_pg_password_aws=super_secret_password
my_pg_host_local=localhost
my_pg_username_local=semi_secret_user
my_pg_password_local=semi_secret_password

Simply add your credentials as in the example above. The arguments to the pg_con() function: host_label, user_label, and password_label are the parts before the equals sign. The actual values needed to connect are the parts following the equals sign. See the example for the pg_con() function.

Make sure there is an extra space at the bottom of the last entry in the .Renviron file before saving, or R will silently fail to read the entries. You will need to close RStudio and then reopen after saving. Afterwards, every time you open RStudio the environment variables will be available in your session.

Detailed instructions on how to add credentials to your .Renviron file can be found in the Appendix section of: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/httr/vignettes/api-packages.html

arestrom/repg documentation built on May 9, 2019, 2:25 p.m.