R Plumber - Build and Deploy Production APIs in R

Start developing and hosting your own APIs with the Plumber package in R!

This course, assuming zero knowledge of APIs, covers all the fundamental concepts behind networking and the R Plumber package, gradually iterating from a blank project, to a production-grade API based on a real-life scenario. You'll get hands-on pretty quickly, with tons of applied coding, testing, quizzes and assignments. Once you have optimised and secured your API, you'll observe first hand its power as you integrate with a pre-built frontend framework. Finally, you will deploy your API live on the internet, using both the Digital Ocean and AWS cloud services, before configuring your custom domain name with Cloudflare.

Each practical exercise aims to improve your Plumber knowledge, starting with simple endpoints all the way to handling advanced API requests and features. For example, you'll design endpoints in order to search and book flights, as well as display passenger numbers and visualisations strictly to the airline's internal team only. But the course doesn't simply tell you how to code - we always provide all the theoretical groundings needed for you to understand why and how to implement such functionality, whether that be in the Plumber or REST API world. Support is always there if you need it too, as we'll be actively monitoring the course's Q&A section to answer your queries on Plumber and running the API.

We can't wait to see what you can build!

Some of the practical use cases to taking this course and creating Plumber APIs include:

• Gaining knowledge of REST APIs and hosting providers

• Application of best practices and conventions for API development

• Moving away from R Shiny whilst keeping the same R code and functionality

• Separation of concerns of frontend and backend components, though allowing for easy integrations between them

• Building a backend for a personal or business website

• Designing a company-internal dashboarding platform, such as a Customer Data Platform (CDP)

• Replacing legacy APIs with modern, secure and sophisticated endpoints

• Developing a quick proof-of-concept to demonstrate new models, algorithms and visualisations built in R

• Allowing existing R functionality to connect with the internet (such as integrating a Slack command to an R function)

The course covers:

• Basics of REST APIs

• Sending API requests using the command line library CURL

• Setting up a Plumber project

• Plumber endpoints (static and dynamic routes)

• Running and testing our API locally

• Swagger API Documentation

• Handling parameter data types

• Query / path / body request parameters

• Serialization (such as HTML, images, interactive plots and CSV formats)

• REST API method types

• Response status codes

• API security

• Pre-processing tasks such as logging and gatekeeping using filters

• Authentication via API keys

• Function asynchrony

• Integration with frontend files

• Deploying our API onto Digital Ocean and AWS!

• Configuring a custom domain