Announcing the Plumber v0.4.4 Release

Plumber is a package which allows you to create web APIs from your R code. If you’re new to Plumber, you can find out more at www.rplumber.io.

We’re excited to announce the v0.4.4 release of Plumber! This release adds a handful of oft-requested features and cleans up a few issues that came out of the major refactor that took place in the 0.4.2 release. We’ve also continued to expand the official Plumber documentation. We’ll mention the highlights below, but you can see the full release notes for v0.4.4 here. The release is on CRAN now, so you can update using:

install.packages("plumber")

Plumber v0.4.4 Highlights

1. Support customized image sizes on the @png and @jpeg annotations. More details here.
2. Support expiration, HTTPOnly, and Secure flags on cookies as discussed here (but see the “Known Bugs” section below for an important note about cookie expiration in v0.4.4).
3. Restore functionality of PlumberStatic routers (#156).
4. Support arguments sent from clients to nested subrouters.
5. For APIs deployed using DigitalOcean, set the working directory to the root of the API before starting.
6. Restore functionality of setErrorHandler.
7. Ignore capitalization when searching for plumber.r and entrypoint.r files when plumb()ing a directory.
8. Support query strings with keys that appear more than once (#165)
9. Fix the validation error warning at the bottom of deployed Swagger files which would have appeared any time your swagger.json file was hosted in such a way that a hosted validator service would not have been able to access it. For now we just suppress validation of swagger.json files. (#149)
10. Support for floating IPs in DNS check that occurs in do_configure_https()
11. Make adding swap file idempotent in do_provision() so you can now call that function on a single droplet multiple times.
12. Support an exit hook which can define a function that will be evaluated when the API is interrupted. e.g. pr <- plumb("plumber.R"); pr$registerHook("exit", function(){ print("Bye bye!") })
13. Fixed bug in which a single function couldn’t support multiple paths for a single verb (#203).

Known Bugs

At the time of writing, one bug has already been fixed since the v0.4.4 release. Cookie expiration times were not properly being sent to clients which caused most clients to ignore these times altogether and revert back to using session cookies. If you wish to set an expiration time on a cookie, you will need to use the development release of Plumber which you can install using:

devtools::install_github("trestletech/plumber")