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ckanr

Project Status: Active – The project has reached a stable, usable state and is being actively developed. R-check rstudio mirror downloads cran version codecov

ckanr is an R client package for the CKAN API, enabling R users to interact with CKAN data portals for reading, writing, and managing datasets. The package wraps the entire CKAN REST API with R functions organized by resource type (packages, resources, organizations, groups, users, tags).

Description

CKAN is an open-source DMS (data management system) for powering data hubs and data portals. CKAN makes it easy to publish, share and use data. It powers hundreds of data portals worldwide.

ckanr allows users to interact with those CKAN websites to create, modify, and manage datasets, as well as search and download pre-existing data, and then to proceed using in R for data analysis (stats/plotting/etc.). It is meant to be as general as possible, allowing you to work with any CKAN instance.

ckanr works for and is tested against - the CKAN v2.11 API, - the CKAN v2.10 API, and - the CKAN v2.9 API.

ckanr may work with older and newer CKAN versions.

Get started: https://docs.ropensci.org/ckanr/

Installation

Stable CRAN version

Development version

# From source
install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("ropensci/ckanr")
# Binary via the rOpenSci universe
options(
  repos = c(
    ropensci = "https://ropensci.r-universe.dev",
    CRAN = "https://cloud.r-project.org"
  )
)
install.packages("ruODK")

Note: the default base CKAN URL is set to https://demo.ckan.org/ Functions requiring write permissions in CKAN additionally require a privileged CKAN API key. You can change this using ckanr_setup(), or change the URL using the url parameter in each function call. To set one or both, run:

ckanr_setup() # restores default CKAN url to https://demo.ckan.org/
ckanr_setup(url = "https://demo.ckan.org/")
ckanr_setup(url = "https://demo.ckan.org/", key = "my-ckan-api-key")

ckanr package API

There are a suite of CKAN things (package, resource, etc.) that each have a set of functions in this package. The functions for each CKAN thing have an S3 class that is returned from most functions, and can be passed to most other functions (this also facilitates piping). The following is a list of the function groups for certain CKAN things, with the prefix for the functions that work with that thing, and the name of the S3 class:

  • Packages (aka packages) - package_*() - ckan_package
  • Resources - resource_*() - ckan_resource
  • Related - related_*() - ckan_related
  • Users - user_*() - ckan_user
  • Groups - group_*() - ckan_group
  • Tags - tag_*() - ckan_tag
  • Organizations - organization_*() - ckan_organization

The S3 class objects all look very similar; for example:

<CKAN Resource> 8abc92ad-7379-4fb8-bba0-549f38a26ddb
  Name: Data From Digital Portal
  Description:
  Creator/Modified: 2015-08-18T19:20:59.732601 / 2015-08-18T19:20:59.657943
  Size:
  Format: CSV

All classes state the type of object, have the ID to the right of the type, then have a varying set of key-value fields deemed important. This printed object is just a summary of an R list, so you can index to specific values (e.g., result$description). If you feel there are important fields left out of these printed summaries, let us know.

note: Many examples are given in brief for readme brevity

Contributors

(alphabetical)

  • Florian Mayer
  • Francisco Alves
  • Hanna Böhner
  • Imanuel Costigan
  • Scott Chamberlain (original creator)
  • Sharla Gelfand
  • Wush Wu

Meta

  • Please report any issues or bugs.
  • License: MIT
  • Get citation information for ckanr in R via citation(package = 'ckanr')
  • Please note that this package is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.
  • If you want to contribute to the package development, please see the contributing guide.