Rpushbullet package

R interface to the Pushbullet service

Description

The Pushbullet service permits users to pass messenges between their computers, phones and other devices such as tablets. It offers immediacy which is perfect for alerting, and much more.

This package provides a programmatic interface from R.

Details

The Pushbullet API offers a RESTful interface which requires an API key. A key can be obtained free of charge from Pushbullet. Given such a key, and one or more registered devices, users can push messages to one or more device, or a given email address.

The main function is pbPost which can be used to send a message comprising a note (with free-form body and title), link (for sending a URL), or even a file. The message recipients is typically one (or several) of the devices known to the user (see the next section for details), it can also be an email address in which case Pushbullet creates and sends an email to the given address.

Initialization

The authentication key, as well as the device id, nicknames for the devices and default device can all be declared in several ways.

One possibility is to use a file .rpushbullet.json in the $HOME directory. (Note that on Windows you may have to set the $HOME environment variable.) It uses the JSON format which uses a key:value pair notation; values may be arrays. A simple example follows.

{ 
    "key": "abc...YourKeyHereBetweenQuote....xyz",

    "devices": [ 
        "abc...SomeId.......xyz",
        "abc...SomeOtherId..xyz"
    ],

    "names": [
        "Phone",
        "Browser"
    ],

    "defaultdevice": "Phone"
}

The entire block is delimited by a pair of curly braces. Within the curly braces we have “key” and “devices” which are mandatory. Here “key” is expected to contain a single value; “devices” can be an array which is denoted by square brackets. Optionally a “names” single value or array can be used to assign nicknames to the devices. Lastly, a “defaultdevice” can be designated as well.

However, use of a configuration file is not mandatory. The arguments can also be supplied as global options (which could be done in the usual R startup files, see Startup for details) as well as via standard function arguments when calling the corresponding functions. When using global options, use the names rpushbullet.key, rpushbullet.devices, rpushbullet.names, and rpushbullet.defaultdevice corresponding to the entries in the JSON file shown above.

The curl binary is required, and is located at package initialization, along with the other load-time intializations described here. It is therefore strongly recommended to attach the package in the normal way via library(RPushbullet) rather than trying to access functions from the package namespace.

Author(s)

Dirk Eddelbuettel

References

See the Pushbullet documentation at the Pushbullet website.