This section explains vcr’s internal design and architecture.
vcr was “ported” from the Ruby gem (aka, library) of the same name1. Because it was ported from Ruby, an object-oriented programming language I thought it would be easier to use an object system in R that most closely resemble that used in Ruby (at least in my opinion). This thinking lead to choosing R6. The exported functions users interact with are not R6 classes, but are rather normal R functions. However, most of the internal code in the package uses R6. Thus, familiarity with R6 is important for people that may want to contribute to vcr, but not required at all for vcr users.
As described above, vcr uses R6 internally, but users interact with normal R functions. Internal functions that are quite complicated are largely R6 while exported, simpler functions users interact with are normal R functions.
Since R vcr was ported from Ruby, we kept most of the names of functions/classes and variables. So if you’re wondering about why a function, class, or variable has a particular name, its derivation can not be found out in this package, for the most part that is.
Perhaps the most fundamental thing about that this package work is how it knows what HTTP requests are being made. This stumped me for quite a long time. When looking at Ruby vcr, at first I thought it must be “listening” for HTTP requests somehow. Then I found out about monkey patching (see also this blog post as a good summary); that’s how it’s achieved in Ruby. That is, the Ruby vcr package literally overrides certain methods in Ruby HTTP clients, hijacking internals of the HTTP clients.
However, monkey patching is not allowed in R. Thus, in R we have to somehow have “hooks” into HTTP clients in R. Fortunately, Scott is the maintainer of one of the HTTP clients, crul, so was able to quickly create a hook. Very fortunately, there was already a hook mechanism in the httr package.
The actual hooks are not in vcr, but in webmockr. vcr depends on webmockr for hooking into HTTP clients httr and crul.
An overview of some of the more important aspects of vcr.
An internal object (vcr_c) is created when vcr is loaded with the default vcr configuration options inside of an R6 class VCRConfig - see https://github.com/ropensci/vcr/blob/master/R/onLoad.R. This class is keeps track of default and user specified configuration options. You can access vcr_c using triple namespace :::, though it is not intended for general use. Whenever you make calls to vcr_configure() or other configuration functions, vcr_c is affected.
Cassette is an R6 class that handles internals/state for each cassette. Each time you run use_cassette() this class is used. The class has quite a few methods in it, so there’s a lot going on in the class. Ideally the class would be separated into subclasses to handle similar sets of logic, but there’s not an easy way to do that with R6.
Of note in Cassette is that when called, within the initialize() call webmockr is used to create webmockr stubs.
Within webmockr, there are calls to the vcr class RequestHandler, which has child classes RequestHandlerCrul and RequestHandlerHttr for crul and httr, respectively. These classes determine what to do with each HTTP request. The options for each HTTP request include:
ignore_hosts and ignore_localhostuse_cassette()/insert_cassette() call. In this case the matching request/response from the cassette is returned with no real HTTP request allowed.use_cassette()/insert_cassette() call. In this case a real HTTP request is allowed, and the request/response is recorded to the cassette.If you use vcr logging you’ll see these categories in your logs.
Serializers handle in what format cassettes are written to files on disk. The current options are YAML (default) and JSON. YAML was implemented first in vcr because that’s the default option in Ruby vcr.
An R6 class Serializer is the parent class for all serializer types; YAML and JSON are both R6 classes that inherit from Serializer. Both YAML and JSON define just two methods: serialize() and deserialize() for converting R structures to yaml or json, and converting yaml or json back to R structures, respectively.
An internal environment (vcr_log_env) is used when you use logging. At this point it only keeps track of one variable - file - to be able to refer to what file is used for logging across many classes/functions that need to write to the log file.
Another internal environment (vcr__env) is used to keep track of a few items, including the current cassette in use, and the last vcr error.
Another internal environment (light_switch) is used to keep track of users turning on and off vcr. See ?lightswitch.
The first version of Ruby’s vcr was released in February 2010 https://rubygems.org/gems/vcr/versions/0.1.0. Ruby vcr source code: https://github.com/vcr/vcr/↩︎