Plumb it and ship it: Deploying a REST API with R and Docker

Imagine: You've spend a lot of work building a really cool data analysis pipeline in R. And now, you should enable your colleagues to use it, but they neither know R nor have R installed.

But you don't know how to setup a complex server architecture on some cloud platform?
Plumber and Docker to the rescue.

Plumber is an R package, which makes it very easy to publish your existing R functions as a REST API, enabling access via your browser.
Docker creates virtual containers making an application run on any machine seamlessly.

Requirements:

• Install Docker: https://www.docker.com/get-started
• Download the Docker image for R including tidyverse: Run
  "docker pull rocker/tidyverse" in the command line