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.
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.
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.
See the Pushbullet documentation at the Pushbullet website.
The documentation for the main function pbPost, as well
as the documentation for pbGetDevices.