Publishing from R

Create Hosted ArcGIS Online or Enterprise Feature Services from R

While you may often consume data as an R user, you may also want to also publish data as a hosted feature service. In this tutorial we will go over how to publish an sf object to ArcGIS Online or Enterprise.

Authorization

In order to publish content to ArcGIS Online or Enterprise, we must first obtain an access token permitting us to do so.

Caution

If you have not yet set up your R environment for authorization, see Connecting to your Portal. Ensure that the environment variables ARCGIS_CLIENT and ARCGIS_USER are set at minimum. If you are using Enterprise ensure that ARCGIS_HOST is properly set as well.

We must go through the code flow to set our credentials.

library(arcgis)

1token <- auth_code()
2set_auth_token(token)
#> Token set to environment variable `ARCGIS_TOKEN`

1: We create an access token
2: We set it to an environment variable.

Now that we have authorized to our Portal, we will be able to publish our content.

Publishing {sf} objects

To publish an {sf} object to our portal, we can use the function publish_layer(). The publishing process requires us to add an item to our portal and publish it. The publish_layer() function handles these steps for us.

Let’s read in the North Carolina SIDS dataset that comes packaged with sf and store it in an object called nc.

nc <- sf::read_sf(system.file("shape/nc.shp", package = "sf"))
nc

Simple feature collection with 100 features and 14 fields
Geometry type: MULTIPOLYGON
Dimension:     XY
Bounding box:  xmin: -84.32385 ymin: 33.88199 xmax: -75.45698 ymax: 36.58965
Geodetic CRS:  NAD27
# A tibble: 100 × 15
    AREA PERIMETER CNTY_ CNTY_ID NAME  FIPS  FIPSNO CRESS_ID BIR74 SID74 NWBIR74
   <dbl>     <dbl> <dbl>   <dbl> <chr> <chr>  <dbl>    <int> <dbl> <dbl>   <dbl>
 1 0.114      1.44  1825    1825 Ashe  37009  37009        5  1091     1      10
 2 0.061      1.23  1827    1827 Alle… 37005  37005        3   487     0      10
 3 0.143      1.63  1828    1828 Surry 37171  37171       86  3188     5     208
 4 0.07       2.97  1831    1831 Curr… 37053  37053       27   508     1     123
 5 0.153      2.21  1832    1832 Nort… 37131  37131       66  1421     9    1066
 6 0.097      1.67  1833    1833 Hert… 37091  37091       46  1452     7     954
 7 0.062      1.55  1834    1834 Camd… 37029  37029       15   286     0     115
 8 0.091      1.28  1835    1835 Gates 37073  37073       37   420     0     254
 9 0.118      1.42  1836    1836 Warr… 37185  37185       93   968     4     748
10 0.124      1.43  1837    1837 Stok… 37169  37169       85  1612     1     160
# ℹ 90 more rows
# ℹ 4 more variables: BIR79 <dbl>, SID79 <dbl>, NWBIR79 <dbl>,
#   geometry <MULTIPOLYGON [°]>

Now that we have an sf object and we have authorized with our portal, all that’s left is to publish the item!

publish_layer() has only two required arguments:

x the sf object or data.frame
title the title of layer we are creating

res <- publish_layer(nc, "North Carolina SIDS")
res
#> $services
#>              type
#> 1 Feature Service
#>                                                                                             serviceurl
#> 1 https://services1.arcgis.com/hLJbHVT9ZrDIzK0I/arcgis/rest/services/North Carolina SIDS/FeatureServer
#>     size                                jobId                    serviceItemId
#> 1 125766 f14451a7-325b-40b0-85c3-534bcf122806 32511ce0413f40d08303e267a7093be0
#>                                                                                          encodedServiceURL
#> 1 https://services1.arcgis.com/hLJbHVT9ZrDIzK0I/arcgis/rest/services/North%20Carolina%20SIDS/FeatureServer

Now from your Portal’s Content listing you should see your feature service. If you open it up you should see something like the below.

Reading the published Feature Layer

The output of this function is a list that contains information about where the sf object was published. We can retrieve the encodedServiceUrl from the response and read the response.

nc_fserver <- arc_open(res[[c("services", "encodedServiceURL")]])
nc_fserver
#> <FeatureServer <1 layer, 0 tables>>
#> CRS: 4267
#> Capabilities: Create,Delete,Query,Update,Editing
#>   0: North Carolina SIDS (esriGeometryPolygon)

You’ll notice that this is a FeatureServer. All items that are published to a Portal become their own Feature Server with a single FeatureLayer.

We can extract a single layer from the FeatureServer using get_layer(). We provide the FeatureServer as the first argument and then the ID of the layer we want as the second argument.

get_layer(nc_fserver, 0)
#> <FeatureLayer>
#> Name: North Carolina SIDS
#> Geometry Type: esriGeometryPolygon
#> CRS: 4267
#> Capabilities: Create,Delete,Query,Update,Editing

Publishing `data.frame`s

Publishing a data.frame follows the same steps as those above. The difference is that it creates a Table object. Try repeating the same process but using the palmerpenguins dataset!

# install.packages("palmerpenguins")
palmerpenguins::penguins

# A tibble: 344 × 8
   species island    bill_length_mm bill_depth_mm flipper_length_mm body_mass_g
   <fct>   <fct>              <dbl>         <dbl>             <int>       <int>
 1 Adelie  Torgersen           39.1          18.7               181        3750
 2 Adelie  Torgersen           39.5          17.4               186        3800
 3 Adelie  Torgersen           40.3          18                 195        3250
 4 Adelie  Torgersen           NA            NA                  NA          NA
 5 Adelie  Torgersen           36.7          19.3               193        3450
 6 Adelie  Torgersen           39.3          20.6               190        3650
 7 Adelie  Torgersen           38.9          17.8               181        3625
 8 Adelie  Torgersen           39.2          19.6               195        4675
 9 Adelie  Torgersen           34.1          18.1               193        3475
10 Adelie  Torgersen           42            20.2               190        4250
# ℹ 334 more rows
# ℹ 2 more variables: sex <fct>, year <int>

Solution

publish_layer(palmerpenguins::penguins, "Palmer Penguins")