Rumors of my demise have been (almost) greatly exaggerated.<\/p>\n
Folks have probably noticed that #52Vis<\/a> has stalled, as has most blogging, package & Twitter activity. I came down with a nasty bout of bronchitis after attending rOpenSci Unconf 16 (there were _so_ many people hacking [the sick kind] up a storm in SFO!) and then managed to get pneumonia (which I’m still working through) so any and all awake time has gone to work, class and fam. However, #52Vis<\/a> winds back up this week, a new R endeavor will be revealed and hopefully I’ll be done with getting ill until Fall.<\/p>\n Getting ill does have some advantages. I completely forgot about renewing SSL\/TLS certificates on some (official – yikes!) sites I help manage and decided to have that not be “a thing” moving forward with some help from R. Specifically, I decided to use the `openssl` and `flexdashboard` packages to accomplish my monitoring goals. I’m probably not the only one who needs to care about SSL\/TLS certificate renewals so my illness-born-invention is presented below for anyone else to use or mod.<\/p>\n ### Flexing flexdashboard muscles<\/p>\n If you haven’t heard about [`flexdashboard`](http:\/\/rstudio.github.io\/flexdashboard\/) then you should visit that link before continuing. It’s an emerging package from the fine folks over at RStudio that makes it super-easy to create quick and pretty dashboards. You can look [at the examples](http:\/\/rstudio.github.io\/flexdashboard\/examples.html) if you want proof. Here’s how `flexdashboard` fit into my goals. I wanted a way to:<\/p>\n – provide a character vector of hosts and ports (you can run SSL\/TLS on any port and for many types of services) I immediately thought of `flexdashboard` but my hopes were quickly dashed when all attempts to provide a list of `valueBox()` elements (as I could with `htmlwidgets` in R markdown documents) failed to deliver the desired result of a scrolling, responsive set of boxes.<\/p>\n My workaround was to have an R script create a `flexdashboard` R markdown document on the fly then call `rmarkdown::render()` to generate the final HTML page. Rather than bore you with a tiny view of the sites I work with, I decided to scrape the list of R CRAN mirrors that are SSL\/TLS-enabled and present them via this rube goldberg contraption as the show-and-tell example.<\/p>\n The annotated code is below and in [this gist](https:\/\/gist.github.com\/hrbrmstr\/910af8ddc6371572aa4414b77ae86c6a).<\/p>\n You can see the output below and can use [this link](\/projects\/sslexpires.html) to bust the iframe.<\/p>\n
\n– retrieve the certificates at those endpoints
\n– compare the expiration date to the current date
\n– provided a dashboard-like view of the state of those certificates, ordered from soonest-expiring to longest-expiring and color-coded (to make it easier to see the certs of impending DOOM)<\/p>\nlibrary(rvest)\r\nlibrary(urltools)\r\nlibrary(rmarkdown)\r\n\r\n# Some Rmd template setup -----------------------------------------------------------\r\n\r\npreamble <- '---\r\ntitle: "CRAN Mirrors Certificate Expiration Dashboard (Days left from %s)"\r\noutput:\r\n flexdashboard::flex_dashboard:\r\n orientation: rows\r\n vertical_layout: scroll\r\n---\r\n```{r setup, include=FALSE}\r\nlibrary(flexdashboard)\r\nlibrary(openssl)\r\nlibrary(purrr)\r\nlibrary(dplyr)\r\nlibrary(scales)\r\n'\r\n\r\nafter_data <- '\r\n\r\ndsc <- safely(download_ssl_cert);\r\n\r\nexpires_delta <- function(site) {\r\n\r\n site_info <- strsplit(site, ":")[[1]]\r\n port <- as.numeric(site_info[2])\r\n\r\n chain_res <- dsc(site_info[1], port)\r\n if (!is.null(chain_res$result)) {\r\n\r\n chain <- chain_res$result\r\n\r\n valid_from <- as.Date(as.POSIXct(as.list(chain[[1]])$validity[1],\r\n "%b %d %H:%M:%S %Y", tz="GMT"))\r\n expires_on <- as.Date(as.POSIXct(as.list(chain[[1]])$validity[2],\r\n "%b %d %H:%M:%S %Y", tz="GMT"))\r\n\r\n data_frame(site=site_info[1],\r\n valid_from=valid_from,\r\n expires_on=expires_on,\r\n cert_valid_length=expires_on-valid_from,\r\n days_left_from_valid=expires_on - valid_from,\r\n days_left_from_today=expires_on - Sys.Date(),\r\n days_left_from_today_lab=comma(expires_on - Sys.Date()),\r\n color="primary",\r\n color=ifelse(days_left_from_today<=15, "danger", color),\r\n color=ifelse(days_left_from_today>15 & days_left_from_today<60, "warning", color))\r\n\r\n } else {\r\n\r\n data_frame(site=site_info[1],\r\n valid_from=NA,\r\n expires_on=NA,\r\n cert_valid_length=NA,\r\n days_left_from_valid=NA,\r\n days_left_from_today=NA,\r\n days_left_from_today_lab="Host unreachable",\r\n color="info")\r\n\r\n }\r\n\r\n}\r\n\r\nssl_df <- arrange(map_df(sites, expires_delta), days_left_from_today)\r\n```\r\n\r\n'\r\n\r\n# Get a list of all https-enabled CRAN mirrors --------------------------------------\r\n\r\npg <- read_html("https:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/mirrors.html")\r\nsites <- sprintf("%s:443", domain(html_attr(html_nodes(pg, "td > a[href^='https:']"), "href")))\r\n\r\n# Capture this vector for use in the R markdown template ----------------------------\r\n\r\nsetup_data <- capture.output(dput(sites))\r\n\r\n# Create a temporary Rmd file -------------------------------------------------------\r\n\r\ndashfile <- tempfile(fileext=".Rmd")\r\n\r\n# Write out the initial template bits we've been making -----------------------------\r\n\r\ncat(sprintf(preamble, Sys.Date()), "sites <- ", setup_data, after_data, file=dashfile)\r\n\r\n# 5 valueBoxes per row seems like a good # ----------------------------------------\r\n\r\nmax_vbox_per_row <- 5\r\n\r\nn_dashrows <- ceiling(length(sites)\/max_vbox_per_row)\r\n\r\n# Generate a valueBox() per site, making rows every max_vbox_per_row ----------------\r\n\r\nfor (i in 1:length(sites)) {\r\n\r\n if (((i-1) %% max_vbox_per_row) == 0) {\r\n cat('\r\nRow\r\n-------------------------------------\r\n\r\n', file=dashfile, append=TRUE)\r\n }\r\n\r\n cat(sprintf("\\n### %s\\n```{r}\\n", gsub(":.*$", "", sites[i])), file=dashfile, append=TRUE)\r\n cat(sprintf('valueBox(ssl_df[%d, "days_left_from_today_lab"], icon="fa-lock", color=ssl_df[%d, "color"])\\n```\\n', i, i),\r\n file=dashfile, append=TRUE)\r\n}\r\n\r\n# Temporary html file (you prbly want this more readily available -------------------\r\n\r\ndir <- tempfile()\r\ndir.create(dir)\r\ndash_html <- file.path(dir, "sslexpires.html")\r\n\r\n# Render the dashboard --------------------------------------------------------------\r\n\r\nrmarkdown::render(dashfile, output_file=dash_html)\r\n\r\n# View in RStudio -------------------------------------------------------------------\r\n\r\nrstudioapi::viewer(dash_html)\r\n\r\n# Clean up --------------------------------------------------------------------------\r\n\r\nunlink(dashfile)<\/code><\/pre>\n