Setting up your computer for the LimeSurvey API

In order to use the LimeSurvey API, you first have to setup your computer with the neccesary credentials.

These credentials are the name of your company account in your LimeSurvey website, your user name and your password.

As we use R to communicate with the API, we will put these credentials in environment variables which are stored in the file .Renviron where our R code will find it.

You can open this file on your machine by first installing the usethis package and then using the edit_r_environ() function:

usethis::edit_r_environ();

Then, add these 3 lines to this file (always finish with a new line!) and save:

LIMESURVEY_HOST="PUT THE DOMAIN NAME OF YOUR LIMESURVEY INSTALLATION HERE!"
LIMESURVEY_USER="PUT YOUR USER NAME HERE!"
LIMESURVEY_PW="PUT YOUR PASSWORD HERE!"

To load these environment variables into your R session, you have to enter the following commands into your R console.

### Load the LimeSurvey environment variables into your R session:

options(
  lime_api =
    paste0(
      "https://", Sys.getenv("LIMESURVEY_HOST"), "/admin/remotecontrol"
    )
  );
options(lime_username = Sys.getenv("LIMESURVEY_USER"));
options(lime_password = Sys.getenv("LIMESURVEY_PW"));

You can store these commands in your .Rprofile file, in order to have them persistently available in every R session.

You can open your .Rprofile file with the command

usethis::edit_r_profile();

Finally you just have to restart R (enter ctrl + shift + F10 in RStudio).

And voilà! Now, you should be able to communicate with the LimeSurvey API with the function limer_upload_tsv_to_limesurvey() or other functions of this package.