Question

Is there some way to source an R script from the web?

e.g. source('http://github.com/project/R/file.r')

Reason: I currently have a project that I’d like to make available for use but isn’t ready to be packaged yet. So it would be great to give people a single file to source from the web (that will then source all the individual function files).

On closer inspection, the problem appears to be https. How would I source this file?

https://raw.github.com/hadley/stringr/master/R/c.r

Answer 1

Yes you can, try running this R tutorial:

source("http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/KB/R/tutorial.R")

(Source)

Https is only supported on Windows, when R is started with the --internet2 command line option (see FAQ):

> source("https://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=zdBYP5Ft")
> test()
[1] "passed"

Without this option, or on linux, you will get the error “unsupported URL scheme”. In that case resort to the solution suggested by @ulidtko, or:

Here is a way to do it using RCurl, which also supports https:

    library(RCurl)
    eval( expr = 
        parse( text = getURL("http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/KB/R/tutorial.R",
                       ssl.verifypeer=FALSE) ))

(You can remove the ssl.verifypeer if the ssl certificate is valid)