GUI or similar front end instead of Bash/cmd?

[susanjo80]

Auto-reviewers: @NiharikaRay @matthewwardrop @earthmancash @danfrankj
Hi,

are there any plans on building a GUI or similar front end for adding and submitting the posts to the repo? Going through the documentation we cannot get this to work and we want it to work SO badly! Just keep running into error after error. I can not see this succeeding with the rest of the team unless we make it easier to use somehow. Are there ideas already floating around for that?

Thanks,
Susan

[matthewwardrop]

Hi @susanjo80 ,

Sorry to hear that you are having so much trouble :(. Can you share what the errors are, so we can work to fix them or guide you through the process a little more? Things seem to be working reliably on our side.

If you are not uploading posts with embedded images and code, you can always just use the web editor that is part of the knowledge-repo web-app. It isn't quite as powerful, and the interface needs some love, but it is definitely workable. You can also create "proxy" posts that link to content hosted elsewhere, but again, these documents are less well integrated.

As for a GUI, internally we have a basic plugin for RStudio that is tightly bound to our specific configuration, but which we may generalise. For Python, I have thought a little about making a Jupyter Notebook plugin but have not started writing anything, in part because I think JupyterLab will probably be the way to go and the plugin API is not stable.

Also, the CLI interface will be greatly improved and simplified in the near future (starting with #308). The new process will create standalone knowledge post files which can be added via the web ui to the knowledge repo; but you will still need to use the CLI to create them in the first place.

Hope that helps. I'll leave this open so we don't lose track of these ambitious.

[susanjo80]

After fixing the error message around it not understanding 'R' as a command via a separate post you referred me to, I now get an error that says 'Error in library(knitr) : there is no package called 'knitr'.

I already went through the steps of adding both my R bin and the directory that houses all of my R packages to my PATH variable, so I'm stumped as to why I'm getting this error.

I'm not sure I understand how you can submit a post via the web editor. On our installation of the knowledge repo I only seem to see a 'Write a Post!' button which lets me download a template for one of the 3 supported file formats. Can you help me understand where to find that?

I would love a plugin for RStudio!! I think that could really help drive adoption of this tool!

About the CLI interface: Since we are already creating Rmd files as part of our regular work, why would we still need to use the CLI interface? Can't we just copy the YAML header style into existing Rmd files?

Thank you so much for your responsiveness on this! Very impressive and helpful!!

[susanjo80]

Follow up: the web editor was not enabled on our version. That's since been fixed.

[susanjo80]

We recently upgraded to the latest version of the repo and I am still receiving the same error that 'knitr' can't be found. Any ideas how to point the repo to where R packages live? Jupyter notebooks post just fine.

[matthewwardrop]

@susanjo80 The software carpentry software linked in #46 seems to fix this issue for people on Windows.

[susanjo80]

I was able to download and get that software to run but alas, no dice. I'm still getting the error that there is no package called 'knitr'. Any other ideas of what might work?
As you can see in the attached screenshot, all of the Anaconda files and R locations are in my PATH.

[susanjo80]

Just a quick follow up:

I was able to submit a Rmd file last night, after doing some more troubleshooting:

Turns out I don’t have write access to the folder where my R packages are installed (I’m following up with IT as to why and how to change that).
To get around that, I had to run R in git bash (“R –vanilla”) and then install the ‘knitr’ package in there, into a folder I DO have access to and I also had to specify the repo to download the package from, like so:
“install.packages("knitr", repos='http://cran.us.r-project.org', lib = "C:/Users/sjohnke")
After doing that, everything started working :)

Tx,
S.

[matthewwardrop]

Hi @susanjo80 ,

As far as the R paths; only the first R path to be resolved will actually be used. What I suspect is happening is that the installation of R resolved first on the command line and the version used in RStudio or whichever IDE are different; and so all of your packages are not available. It looks like you have three potential installations, so try changing the order of the paths until all your packages are available via the command line.

Best,
M

[analyticalmonk]

@matthewwardrop Are you guys planning to open source the Rstudio plugin you mentioned earlier anytime soon?