A recap on R Language.

Its been a while since I have done some project/tasks with R.

But recently, I had an idea to put a Flexdashboard inside a mdx post for Astro websites.

And this thing worked perfectly…

But how can explain to someone whats going on?

Well…

R Setup

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y software-properties-common apt-transport-https

sudo apt update
sudo apt install r-base #this is ~150mb to get installed
sudo apt install pandoc #and this around ~200mb

See that R is ready with:

R --version

Right now im getting the 4.3.3 R version for x86.

IDE Setup

As always, anything will work…but vscode was not the popular one for R.

I used RStudio, which has been renamed to post

wget https://download1.rstudio.org/electron/jammy/amd64/rstudio-2024.12.0-467-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i rstudio-2024.12.0-467-amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -f #with dependencies
rstudio #open it
R.version #test the R CLI inside rstudio

https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0r3iLGJgmQ

https://posit.co/blog/rstudio-is-now-posit/

Where are we working now?

getwd()
setwd("~/Documents/acoolproject")

R Dependencies Setup

install.packages("leaflet", dependencies = TRUE)
install.packages("leaflet.extras")

install.packages("remotes")
#remotes::install_github('rstudio/flexdashboard')

Features I Love in R

Maps

Geospatial Data is awsome, and most of the times unused.

https://jalcocert.github.io/JAlcocerT/blog/tinker-phyphox/

At some point I was putting together .GPX files with the help of https://www.youtrack.es

But you can do it also with some script.

• References:
  • https://r-craft.org/r-and-gpx-how-to-read-and-visualize-gpx-files-in-r/
  • https://trafficonese.github.io/leaflet.extras/reference/omnivore.html
  • https://www.kaggle.com/code/miguelfzzz/cool-dashboard-in-r-with-youtube-tutorial/report?scriptVersionId=74682468
  • https://rfun.library.duke.edu/portfolio/mapping_workshop/
  • https://rfun.library.duke.edu/portfolio/dashboard_workshop/
  • https://rfun.library.duke.edu/portfolio/shiny_workshop/

You will also hear about GeoJSON format, KML, TopoJSON

Animations

Generally plots in R got me in love: https://r-graph-gallery.com/

FlexDashboards

The cool thing?

We can have leaflet maps, HTML widgets, even animations inside of them.

They can be enhanced with:

1. https://www.htmlwidgets.org/

• https://pkgs.rstudio.com/flexdashboard/
• https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/flexdashboard/index.html
• https://github.com/rstudio/flexdashboard
  • https://rstudio.github.io/flexdashboard/articles/using.html

install.packages("flexdashboard") #flexdashboard package from CRAN
remotes::install_github('rstudio/flexdashboard') #development version of the package, install it from GitHub via the remotes package

And now render the dashboard:

Rscript -e "rmarkdown::render('z_my_dashboardv2.Rmd')"
python3 -m http.server 8001 #or 8001 if thats taken...

• References:
  • http://lenkiefer.com/2017/01/22/a-guide-to-building-an-interactive-flexdashboard/

FlexDashboard with Github Pages and Github Actions

Github Actions is an awsome and free CI/CD tool to use.

Shiny

Shiny I created my very first web app.

In the meantime, there is now Shiny for Python.

Containers for Shiny Apps

https://jalcocert.github.io/JAlcocerT/building-r-shiny-apps-container-image-with-docker/