R developer package deployment

An R developer can expand on the available functions and libraries by creating TERR functions or open-source R functions in packages for processing requests from their clients.

Typically, an R developer might want to download packages available from the CRAN repository, a curated public R package repository accessed through a web browser. Your company can easily establish and maintain an in-house repository to contain publicly-available and customized packages, administered by the administrator or by a specified package curator. One easy way to establish an in-house repository is by using the drat package, which is also available on CRAN. The drat package can establish a package repository on a web server or on a file system. See its help, included with the package, for more information.

Important: Remember that when installing and configuring Spotfire Statistics Services to use a statistical engine, consider the configurations and strategies to restrict access. See Recommendations for safeguarding your environment for detailed information.

The administrator and (if granted permissions) R developers can deploy, update, or remove packages on Spotfire Statistics Services using the following techniques.

  • Logging in as administrator on the computer where Spotfire Statistics Services is installed, and opening the TERR or open-source R console application to call install.packages() or remove.packages().
  • Using the Administration APIs provided with Spotfire Statistics Services. The APIs include C# and Java versions. See their help for more information.

  • Installing Eclipse, and then using the Eclipse plugin for TERR (available with Spotfire Statistics Services).

    Note: These tools do not support uploading or updating packages on a Spotfire Statistics Services server that has authentication enabled. If your Spotfire Statistics Services uses authentication, you should make your plugins and package repository available on a web server that does not require authentication. Be sure to provide the server location to your R developers.

See the TIBCO® Enterprise Runtime for R Technical Documentation on https://docs.tibco.com/products/tibco-enterprise-runtime-for-r for more detailed information about managing packages in your organization.

Spotfire Statistics Services supports only binary packages, which are pre-compiled and have a .zip extension on Windows or a .tar.gz extension on UNIX/Linux. Packages are not cross-platform compatible, so the developer must build the package specifically for each platform. In the case of open-source R binary packages, the developer must use an open-source R engine configured with the option –-enable-R-shlib enabled.

Note: Open-source R is available under separate open source software license terms and is not part of TERR. As such, open-source R is not within the scope of your license for TERR. Open-source R is not supported, maintained, or warranted in any way by TIBCO Software Inc. Download and use of open-source R is solely at your own discretion and subject to the free open source license terms applicable to open-source R.
  • Package availability on the server
    R packages are deployed on the server by the package developer, who must decide when and how the package can be accessed by the code.
  • Package development references
    The following resources can help developers creating and managing packages that use the TERR engine or the open-source R engine.
Related concepts