servr

A simple HTTP server to serve files under a given directory based on the httpuv package.

You can install this package from CRAN (stable version) via install.packages('servr') or r-universe.dev (development version).

This package is licensed under GPL.

Serve static files

To some degree, this package is like python -m SimpleHTTPServer or python -m http.server. It may be used to serve:

• R Markdown applications
  • bookdown books
  • blogdown websites
  • xaringan presentations
• googleVis charts (to avoid the Flash security issue)
• D3 charts which need to load JSON from local files (see also the animint2 package), and samatha, etc

You can either run servr::httd() in an interactive R session, or run from command line:

# default: port 4321, do not launch browser
Rscript -e "servr::httd()"

# open a web browser
Rscript -e "servr::httd()" -b

# listen on port 4000
Rscript -e "servr::httd()" -p4000

# pass arguments to the httd() function
Rscript -e "servr::httd(,4000,TRUE)"

There is also a shell script under system.file('bin', package = 'servr'); if it is added to PATH, you can simply run

servr  # serve the current directory
servr -b  # launch the browser
servr -b -p4000  # change port to 4000

Serve and watch a directory

Similar to httd(), the function httw() can both serve and watch a directory. If you are viewing an HTML file in the browser, it will be automatically refreshed whenever there are any changes in the directory (e.g. you added, deleted, or modified certain files in the directory).

Serve dynamic documents

Besides httd(), there are functions jekyll(), rmdv1(), and rmdv2() in this package to serve HTML files generated from R Markdown documents (via knitr or rmarkdown). R Markdown documents can be automatically re-compiled when their HTML output files are older than the corresponding source files, and HTML pages in the web browser can be automatically refreshed accordingly, so you can focus on writing R Markdown documents, and results will be updated on the fly in the web browser. This is even more useful when you write R Markdown documents in the RStudio IDE, because the HTML files are displayed in the RStudio viewer pane, and you can put the source document and its output side by side.

Serve package vignettes

The function vign() can be used to serve R Markdown/HTML package vignettes. The HTML output files are generated and displayed in the web browser so you can preview the vignettes, and they will be cleaned up after they are loaded in the web browser to make sure your source package is clean.

Daemonized server

All server functions can be used in the daemonized mode, i.e., they can be non-blocking in the R session, which allows you to continue working in the R console after the server is launched. This mode can be set via the argument daemon = TRUE in most server functions. See ?server_config for more information.