# The Spotfire SPK

A Spotfire SPK is usually created and tested by developers to package and deploy third-party extensions to the Spotfire Server, which can then be distributed to Spotfire Analyst users, or distributed to the Spotfire Server node for use by another service.

Note: Even though they are both called “packages”, the R package and the Spotfire package (SPK) are different.

- The R package (usually downloaded from a repository) contains specialized R functions.
- The SPK is a means to deploy extensions to the Spotfire Server, which either distributes its contents to Spotfire Analyst users, or installs for a service, such as the TERR service, to use from the Spotfire Server node.

To make it easy to create SPK files containing R functions, TERR contains an R package, SpotfireSPK, that has two functions:

- `buildSPK`, which creates an SPK containing packages suitable for distribution to other Spotfire Analyst clients to create analyses using data functions.
  Note: This use case applies only to TERR and not TERR service, so it is not covered in the TERR service documentation. For more information about creating packages to be distributed to your team members, see the "Package Management" section of the Spotfire® Enterprise Runtime for R Technical Documentation.
- `buildServerSPK`, which creates an SPK containing packages suitable for distribution to a Spotfire Server for use by the TERR service.

This documentation does not cover the Spotfire SPK in general, only those built using the SpotfireSPK package and containing R packages. For more general information about extending Spotfire using the SPK, see the Spotfire SDK documentation available at docs.tibco.com.