Setup

There are several ways to use flowR. You can download and build it from source, download the accompanying docker image, or use its Visual Studio Code extension and RStudio Addin.

• 🗒️ Using the Visual Studio Code Extension
• 🗒️ Using the RStudio Addin
• 🐳️ Using the Docker Image
• ⚒️ Building From Scratch
• 📜 Developing for flowR

If you want to develop for flowR, you want to see how to build from scratch and have a look at the Contributing Guidelines.

🗒️ Using the Visual Studio Code Extension

The easiest way to use flowR is to install the Visual Studio Code extension. The extension directly includes a version of flowR that can be used by default, so you can start analyzing code right away (given that you have R installed on your system). Please check out the marketplace entry for more information. This extension works with Positron as well (in general, it is available on open-vsx as well).

🗒️ Using the RStudio Addin

You can also use flowR as an RStudio Addin. Please check out the RStudio Addin repository for more information on how to get started!

🐳️ Using the Docker Image

You can get the image from docker hub by running:

docker pull eagleoutice/flowr

Afterward, you can test if the installation was successful by running the following (currently, there is no helper script for that):

docker run -it --rm eagleoutice/flowr

This should drop you into flowR's read-evaluate-print loop. Enter :help to receive more information and :quit to leave. Please remember that you have to link external directories to make them available within the running container.

To start flowr as a server, you can run:

docker run -it --rm -p1042:1042 eagleoutice/flowr --server

For more information, see the Interface wiki page.

⚒️ Building From Scratch

To use flowR, you may need R installed and on your path (this only affects the r-shell engine, which is not the default).

Installing R

Although there are several ways to do so, there is nothing wrong with installing R with the help of your favorite package manager or directly from the website.^<1> For 🪟 Windows, see here for an explanation on how to add R to your path variable. Again, you only require this for the r-shell engine.

Installing Node.js

Furthermore, you need the node package manager (for Linux, we recommend using nvm). To work, we currently rely on node versions starting from 22.x.

Installing flowR

After cloning the repository,^<2> you can install the dependencies with:

npm i

After that, you should be fine! You may test flowR's command-line interface by running the following from the cli directory:

npm run slicer -- --criterion "12@product" test/testfiles/example.R

The output should look similar to this:

product <- 1
N <- 10
for(i in 1:(N-1)) product <- product * i
cat("Product:", product, "\n")

At the time of writing this, there is currently no page for frequently encountered errors. So just message me in case of problems.

📜 Developing for flowR

If you want to develop for flowR, explore the wiki. For details on how to contribute, please refer to the CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository.

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<1>: Currently, flowR is only tested with R versions 4.x and 3.6.x.

<2>: We use git-lfs to store larger files, especially for the wiki pages. So if you want to work on these parts, make sure to have it set-up (see the CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository for more information).