boxr

A lightweight, opinionated, high-level R interface to the box.com API, standing on the shoulders of httr.

Box is a cloud content-management and file-sharing service. The goal of the boxr package is to make it easier for you to integrate your Box account into your R workflow.

New in boxr 0.3.7

Bug fixes

• Harmonizes the default location for tokens; ~ resolves to the home directory for all platforms. A patch is applied offering to move tokens from “old” locations. This bug appeared on Windows only.

Documentation

• Updates documentation, updating some steps and adding alt-text for figures.

Build

• Reduces and rationalizes package-dependencies.

All changes are detailed in the NEWS.

Installation

You can install boxr from CRAN, with:

install.packages("boxr")

If you’d like to install the development version from GitHub, use:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("r-box/boxr")

Documentation

The package-documentation website is created and maintained using pkgdown. The documentation website consists of:

• a CRAN-version site.
• a development-version site.

Usage

We have a Get-started article that goes into more detail on interacting with your Box account using R.

Authentication

If you have access to client_id and client_secret for a Box-app, you can use box_auth() to authenticate:

box_auth(client_id = "your_client_id", client_secret = "your_client_secret")

This will kick off a process that, all being well, will keep you authenticated for the rest of the R session. By saving this information to your .Renviron file, at your next R session you can use, without arguments:

box_auth()

If you don’t have access to client_id and client_secret, you should read the authentication article to determine your next steps. In most cases, this next step will be to create an interactive Box-app

Basic operations

• Accessing Box files: box_ul(), box_dl(), box_version_history().
• Accessing Box directories: box_setwd(), box_getwd(), box_dir_create(), box_ls(), box_search().
• Directory-wide operations: box_push(), box_fetch().

Advanced operations

• Interactng with Box files: box_collab_create(), box_comment_create(), box_add_description().
• Using Box trash: box_delete_file(), box_delete_folder(), box_restore_file(), box_restore_folder().
• Interacting with your R session: box_read(), box_write(), box_read_rds(), box_save_rds(), box_save(), box_load(), box_browse().

Alternatives

Other ways to interact with a Box account include:

• The Box desktop apps.
• The other boxr, written in Ruby. Its motivations are rather different, and it covers 100% of the box.com API (e.g account administration, etc.).
• Box themselves provide a wide range of SDKs, including one for Python.

Contributing

Always very welcome! If you’d like to submit a pull request for a new feature, ideally it would be documented, come with an addition to NEWS.md, and have a test or two. This project has a standard Code of Conduct.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015-2025 boxr contributors

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.