Creating Pins on Connect Server

• Author: Trishang Udhwani

Overview

Pins lets you pin an R or Python object, or a file to a virtual board where you and others access it.

The process is described in the official documentation at: Pins. Please refer to that link for details.

Every pin lives on a board, so your first step is to create a board object which can be called. This can be done using the function board <- pins::board_connect().
Note that no arguments are passed to board_connect(). This function is designed to just work for most cases.

However, if you are using an out-dated version of Rstudio (versions before 2024.04.1) then this function may not work.
In that case can specify the auth method to inform how you authenticate to Connect. This can be done by using auth = "envvar" as the argument.

To do this, set environment variables with usethis::edit_r_profile() to open your .Renviron for editing, and then insert Sys.setenv(CONNECT_API_KEY="paste key value") and Sys.setenv(CONNECT_SERVER="https://connect.posit.vetinst.no/"). Remember to insert a newline character (press ENTER) before saving this file.

Now you can create the board object using board <- pins::board_connect(auth = "envvar")

Additional things to consider

Remember, if you’re using git, it’s a good idea to add your .Renviron to your .gitignore to ensure you’re not publishing your API key to your version control system.