progressr: A Unifying API for Progress Updates

The progressr package provides a minimal, unifying API for scripts and packages to report progress updates from anywhere including when using parallel processing.

Details

The package is designed such that the developer can to focus on what progress should be reported on without having to worry about how to present it.

The end user has full control of how, where, and when to render these progress updates. For instance, they can chose to report progress in the terminal using utils::txtProgressBar() or progress::progress_bar() or via the graphical user interface (GUI) using utils::winProgressBar() or tcltk::tkProgressBar(). An alternative to above visual rendering of progress, is to report it using beepr::beep() sounds. It is possible to use a combination of above progression handlers, e.g. a progress bar in the terminal together with audio updates. Besides the existing handlers, it is possible to develop custom progression handlers.

The progressr package uses R's condition framework for signaling progress updated. Because of this, progress can be reported from almost anywhere in R, e.g. from classical for and while loops, from map-reduce APIs like the lapply() family of functions, purrr, plyr, and foreach. The progressr package will also work with parallel processing via the future framework, e.g. future.apply::future_lapply(), furrr::future_map(), and foreach::foreach() with doFuture.

The progressr package is compatible with Shiny applications.

Progression Handlers

In the terminal:

• handler_txtprogressbar (default)

• handler_pbcol

• handler_pbmcapply

• handler_progress

• handler_ascii_alert

• handler_debug

In a graphical user interface (GUI):

• handler_rstudio

• handler_tkprogressbar

• handler_winprogressbar

As sound:

• handler_beepr

• handler_ascii_alert

Via the file system:

• handler_filesize

In Shiny:

• withProgressShiny

Examples

library(progressr)

xs <- 1:5

with_progress({
  p <- progressor(along = xs)
  y <- lapply(xs, function(x) {
    Sys.sleep(0.1)
    p(sprintf("x=%g", x))
    sqrt(x)
  })
})