Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Off Topic: A Package to Send Text Messages From R

If you often run long processes in R and want to get the results notified to you once finished, but not always around to check it on the terminal, this is a very useful package. 

Of course one option is to send a mail from R (there are quite a few packages for that). However, this may not be a very safe option if you are running the R process on a remote machine (on the cloud). Most mail packages in R will require you to enter your mail password in clean text. While this is okay for your local machine, on the cloud it is a little bit unsafe. Another difficulty is your R process will have to sign in to your mail account (Gmail for example) to be able to send the message. However, your mail provider can refuse - like Google will, citing an unidentified app access. To bypass that you have to considerably reduce your security option in your mail account - which is not ideal.

Texting the message using a third party service like Twilio is a great alternative. They offer a free-tier account (with no expiry as they claim). If you are not a heavy user, my best guess is that will be sufficient in most cases. This package simply wraps the REST API interface from Twilio for the simple text messaging service inside an R package for convenience. All that is needed is signing up for the service and obtain the assigned mobile number, and authentication details and you are good to go. I am not sure about the restrictions on international texts, but this works fine for me for local texts. Results direct to my mobile with insignificant time delay.

You can download the package from here. The installation and usage (pretty straightforward) are in the readme file in the repository.

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