README.Rmd

---
output: rmarkdown::github_document
---

`devd` : Install, Start and Stop 'devd' Instances from R

The 'devd' <https://github.com/cortesi/devd> utility is "a web daemon for 
developers". It is written in the 'Go' programming language and distributed in both
source and statically-linked, zero-dependency binary form. It's more lightweight
than 'node.js' or 'Python' equivalents and designed to support front-end development
tasks. It is a good companion for developing 'htmlwidgets' or other web-content.

The intent of this package is meant to make it dirt simple to fire up a simple web
server in the backround along with a bona-fide system web browser from R (i.e. no need to even use the RStudio new built-in terminal) and also get access to the access log from it.

A primary use-case is to use R to generate data for interactive D3 visualizations (not the `htmlwidget` kind, but one-off, special-purpose ones) and also use RStudio for
editing the HTML/CSS/JS resources (RStudio R Projects are great ways to keep web projects organized).

It's also handy when doing something like the above and also want to test it with someting like [fiery](https://github.com/thomasp85/fiery) as a back-end API.

The following functions are implemented:

- `devd_log`:	Retrieve current "access log" buffer
- `devd_start`:	Start up a devd process
- `devd_stop`:	Stop a running devd process
- `install_devd`:	Install devd server for your platform
- `remove_devd`: Remove all sysetm traces of `devd` installed/created by this package

### Installation / Usage

```{r eval=FALSE}
devtools::install_github("r-pkgs/processx")
devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/devd")

library(devd)

install_devd() # only need to do this once

dd <- devd_start()

devd_log(dd) # see the access log since last time `devd_log(dd)` was called

devd_stop(dd)

remove_devd() # if you want to get rid of anything the package installed/created
```