apifetch

apifetch is a small, dependency-light toolkit for talking to token-authenticated REST APIs from R. It handles three recurring chores:

1. Token management — store/get/remove/list tokens in process environment variables (never written to disk), namespaced per service.
2. Request building — pluggable authentication and pagination strategies, bundled into a reusable API profile.
3. Data retrieval — fetch one page, or fetch everything in chunks row-bound into a single tibble.

It is the generic engine extracted from the BigDataPE package; BigDataPE is now just one use case (see vignette("bigdatape")). A Python sibling lives at apifetch-py.

Installation

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("StrategicProjects/apifetch")

Usage

library(apifetch)

# 1. Describe the API once: where, how to authenticate, how to paginate.
api <- af_api(
  endpoint   = "https://api.example.com/v1/search",
  service    = "Example",
  auth       = af_auth_bearer(),          # "Authorization: Bearer <token>"
  pagination = af_paginate_offset("query")
)

# 2. Store a token (kept only in this session's environment).
af_store_token("reports", "my-secret-token", service = "Example")

# 3. Fetch.
one_page <- af_fetch(api, "reports", limit = 50)
everything <- af_fetch_all(api, "reports", chunk_size = 1000)

Strategies

Authentication: af_auth_bearer(), af_auth_raw(), af_auth_header(), af_auth_query().

Pagination: af_paginate_offset(where = "header" | "query"), af_paginate_none(). ```