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buoyant

Deploy _server.yml Compliant Applications to DigitalOcean

Overview

buoyant is an R package for deploying web server applications that follow the _server.yml standard to DigitalOcean. This standard provides a unified way to specify and deploy R web servers regardless of the underlying framework (plumber2, fiery, etc.).

Installation

You can install the development version of buoyant from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("posit-dev/buoyant")

Usage

Basic Deployment 

library(buoyant)
library(analogsea)

# Authenticate with DigitalOcean
do_oauth()

# Provision a new server
droplet <- do_provision(region = "sfo3")

# Deploy your application
do_deploy_server(
  droplet = droplet,
  path = "myapp",
  local_path = "path/to/my-api",
  port = 8000
)

# Get the URL
do_ip(droplet, "/myapp")

The _server.yml Standard

The _server.yml standard is a lightweight specification for R web servers. At minimum, you need an engine field:

engine: plumber2

Each engine package (like plumber2 or fiery) can define additional fields. The engine R package must provide a launch_server(settings, host = NULL, port = NULL, ...) function.

Features

  • Framework Agnostic: Works with any _server.yml-compliant engine
  • Easy Deployment: One function call to deploy an application - do_deploy_server()
  • Automatic Setup: Creates systemd services and nginx configuration
  • HTTPS Support: Easy Let’s Encrypt integration via do_configure_https()
  • Multiple Apps: Deploy multiple applications to one server
  • Validation: Validate configurations before deployment with validate_server_yml()

Getting Help

Supported Engines

The following R packages support the _server.yml standard:

To make your own package compatible, see the _server.yml specification.

Acknowledgments

This package is inspired by plumberDeploy by Bruno Tremblay and Jeff Allen. The _server.yml standard was developed as part of the plumber2 project.