Setup

Authentication setup

You’ll need to acquire an API key from AQS. To do so, epair provides the function get.aqs.key() with your email as its parameter. After calling get.aqs.key() check your email to obtain your key. Be sure to confirm your account by clicking on the link in the email if acquiring a key for the first time.

epair uses .Renviron to access your email and key when making calls. A simple way to setup your key and email is through the usethis package with the following command.

usethis::edit_r_environ()

This will open up the .Renviron file where you can store your email and key. You MUST store your key and email using the exactformat aqs_api_key=‘received_key’ and aqs_email=‘youremail@domain.com’. Otherwise, the package will assume you haven’t declared your credentials.

Note you also need to restart R to ensure that changes take effect.

If even after restarting R, Sys.getenv(‘aqs_email’) is returning a null string, you can also try setting the variables with the Sys.setenv() command as follows Sys.setenv(aqs_email = “youremail@domain.com”) and Sys.setenv(aqs_api_key = “received_key”).

Checking if the API is running

All queries automatically check if the API is running. It might make sense, however, to check the API is up before making multiple queries. The package allows you to make this check easily.

is.API.running()