This is a R wrapper for the Pocket API. You can use pocketapi
to access and modify your own pockets and to add new links to your Pocket programmatically.
Functions include:
pocket_add()
pocket_get()
pocket_archive()
pocket_delete()
pocket_favorite()
pocket_unfavorite()
pocket_tag()
The package is not yet on CRAN.
This package is currently only available on GitHub. You can install it using devtools
.
# install devtools package if it's not already
install.packages("devtools")
# install package from GitHub
devtools::install_github("correlaid/pocketapi")
# load package
library(pocketapi)
You need to create a Pocket application in the Pocket developer portal to access your Pocket data. Don’t worry: this app will only be visible to you and only serves the purpose of acquiring the credentials for pocketapi
.
pocketapi
functions:pocketapi function |
what it does | needed permission |
---|---|---|
pocket_get |
get data frame of all your pockets | Retrieve |
all other pocket_* functions |
add new Pocket entries | Modify |
pocketapi
uses the OAuth2 flow provided by the Pocket Authentication API to get an access token for your App. Because Pocket does not closely follow the OAuth standard, we could not provide as smooth an experience as other packages do (e.g. googlesheets4). Instead, the user has to do the following once to obtain an access token:
request_token <- get_request_token(consumer_key)
create_authorize_url
in your browser::warning: This step is critical: Even if you have authorized your app before and you want to get a new access token, you need to do the authorization in your browser again. Otherwise, the request token will not be authorized to generate an access token!
You can now already use the package by specifying the consumer key and access token manually as arguments to each function call:
pocketapi::pocket_get(consumer_key = consumer_key, access_token = access_token)
To make it easier to work with the package, you should set them as environment variables.
Important: Never make your consumer_key
and access_token
publicly available - anyone will be able to access your Pockets!
It is common practice to set API keys in your R environment file so that every time you start R the key is loaded.
All pocketapi
functions access your consumer_key
and access_token
automatically by executing Sys.getenv("POCKET_CONSUMER_KEY")
respectively Sys.getenv("POCKET_ACCESS_TOKEN")
. Alternatively, you can provide an explicit definition of your consumer_key
and access_token
with each function call.
In order to add your key to your environment file, you can use the function edit_r_environ
from the usethis
package:
This will open your .Renviron
file in the RStudio editor. Now, you can add the following lines to it:
POCKET_CONSUMER_KEY="yourkeygoeshere"
POCKET_ACCESS_TOKEN="youraccesstokengoeshere"
Save the file and restart R for the changes to take effect.
If your .Renviron
lives at a non-conventional place, you can also edit it manually using RStudio or your favorite text editor.
If you don’t want to clutter the .Renviron
file in your home folder, you can also use a local .Renviron
file in your project folder and read it in using the readRenviron()
function. In this case, make sure to never share your local .Renviron
file.
Check out the vignette to see in more detail how to add, get, and modify your Pockets using those functions.
This package has some limitations:
modify
action is not successful, the API will still return “success”. See [issue #26 for a discussion of weird behaviours of the API.Contributions to this package are welcome. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md
.