devtools (version 1.4.1)

source_url: Run a script through some protocols such as http, https, ftp, etc.

Description

Internally, source_url calls getURL in RCurl package and then read the contents by textConnection, which is then sourceed. See ?getURL for the available protocol.

Usage

source_url(url, ..., sha1 = NULL)

Arguments

url

url

...

other options passed to source

sha1

The (prefix of the) SHA-1 hash of the file at the remote URL.

Details

If a SHA-1 hash is specified with the sha1 argument, then this function will check the SHA-1 hash of the downloaded file to make sure it matches the expected value, and throw an error if it does not match. If the SHA-1 hash is not specified, it will print a message displaying the hash of the downloaded file. The purpose of this is to improve security when running remotely-hosted code; if you have a hash of the file, you can be sure that it has not changed. For convenience, it is possible to use a truncated SHA1 hash, down to 6 characters, but keep in mind that a truncated hash won't be as secure as the full hash.

Examples

source_url("https://gist.github.com/hadley/6872663/raw/hi.r")

# With a hash, to make sure the remote file hasn't changed
source_url("https://gist.github.com/hadley/6872663/raw/hi.r",
  sha1 = "54f1db27e60bb7e0486d785604909b49e8fef9f9")

# With a truncated hash
source_url("https://gist.github.com/hadley/6872663/raw/hi.r",
  sha1 = "54f1db27e60")