WebR is a web implementation of the R statistical software in a web browser built using the Node.js and WebAssembly framework. The official documentation will have a better explanation of how WebR works. However, the gist of WebR is the ability to run R code directly in the web browser, without the need of installing R or running code on a server.
The purpose of this blog post is to provide a baseline example implementation of WebR in Quarto. The example instructions provided here is based on the the following github example by James J Balamuta, the developer of the webr quarto extension.
The below code chunk will construct a section of the rendered quarto document where R code can be ran directly in the browser. Although the development of WebR is still early, the ability to run R code directly in the browser, and without the need of a server or additional infrastructure is a very power tool.
Some of the current limitations of WebR is speed, and the need to ‘install’ packages to prime the WebR environment. I can only imagine that issue with speed will only improve in due time. Packages will also need to be specifically compiled for WebAssembly. The current default repository for R packages compiled for WebR can be found here.
Before a specific R package can be utilized, we will need to ‘install’ the WebR compiled version of the package in a WebR environment like so.
Once the WebR package has been installed, we can load the library as we normally would.
Reuse
Citation
@online{luu2023,
author = {Luu, Michael},
title = {Implementation of {WebR} in {Quarto}},
date = {2023-11-15},
langid = {en}
}