redditapi

Tools to interact with the Reddit OAuth2 API in R.

Installation

You can install the development version of redditapi from github:

remotes::install_github("paulc91/redditapi")

Setup Reddit API application

To authenticate to use the OAuth2 API, you need your own application. The following instructions are based on Reddit’s OAuth2 Quick Start Example and will only work for ‘script’ type apps, which will ONLY have access to accounts registered as “developers” of the app and require the application to know the user’s password.

• Create a reddit user account (if you don’t already have one)

• Create API application

  • give it a name
  • select ‘script’ (an application intended for a single developer)
  • add a description
  • provide a redirect URL (this won’t actually be used but is required so put something like http://localhost:8080)

Once created, note the application client_id (below the app name) and secret.

Store credentials as R environment variables

You will need the client id, secret and name (agent) of your API application, as well as your reddit username and password to authenticate in R. It is a good idea to store these as environment variables using an .Renviron file either in your home or project directory.

You can generate or edit an .Renviron with the usethis package function usethis::edit_r_environ(scope = "user"). Change the scope to "project" to limit the environment variables to the current project you are working in rather than all R sessions for your user.

Add the following to the .Renviron file, then save and restart the R session.

REDDIT_CLIENT_ID=your_client_id_here
REDDIT_SECRET=your_secret_here
REDDIT_AGENT=your_app_name_here
REDDIT_USERNAME=your_username_here
REDDIT_PASSWORD=your_password_here

Example usage

Load package and your API credentials

library(redditapi)
library(dplyr)

client_id <- Sys.getenv("REDDIT_CLIENT_ID") # the client id of your api application
secret <- Sys.getenv("REDDIT_SECRET") # the secret of your api application
agent <- Sys.getenv("REDDIT_AGENT") # the name of your api application
username <- Sys.getenv("REDDIT_USERNAME") # your personal reddit username
password <- Sys.getenv("REDDIT_PASSWORD") # your personal reddit password

Retrieve a token

token <- get_reddit_token(
  agent = agent,
  client_id = client_id,
  secret = secret,
  username = username,
  password = password
)

Retrieve post data from a subreddit

Because we have authenticated and are using the OAuth2 api, you can access private subreddits you are a member of.

• limit is the number of posts to return per page (100 maximum)
• max_pages is the max number of pages to attempt to pull per request

The total number of items returns will be limit * max_pages, or all items in the subreddit if that number is lower.

# request the 200 most recent posts from the r/ambient music subreddit
posts <- get_reddit_posts(
  subreddit = "ambient", 
  token = token,
  agent = agent, 
  username = username, 
  limit = 100,
  max_pages = 2 
)
#> Page 1 returned
#> Page 2 returned

A data.frame for each page requested is returned inside a list. We can then use dplyr to combine all pages together and extract the information we are interested in:

posts_df <- 
  bind_rows(posts) %>% 
  as_tibble() %>% 
  select(created_utc, author, title, url, score, num_comments) %>% 
  mutate(created_utc = lubridate::as_datetime(created_utc))

posts_df
#> # A tibble: 200 x 6
#>    created_utc         author   title           url           score num_comments
#>    <dttm>              <chr>    <chr>           <chr>         <int>        <int>
#>  1 2020-10-10 22:49:14 zenlear… "Earth Modular… https://www.…     1            0
#>  2 2020-10-10 15:17:57 thepart… "The Parttime … https://yout…     1            1
#>  3 2020-10-09 22:25:05 _perdom… "Nate Perdomo … https://yout…     7            1
#>  4 2020-10-09 21:16:57 dontsta… "dontstaylong … https://dont…     3            0
#>  5 2020-10-09 17:15:13 laikapr… "Logic Moon - … https://www.…     1            0
#>  6 2020-10-09 11:10:31 Aksetaka "Aksetaka - Th… https://akse…     1            1
#>  7 2020-10-09 09:26:32 BobChar… "Yarra | Ambie… https://yout…     3            1
#>  8 2020-10-08 21:01:13 Rolacruz "Rola Cruz - M… https://yout…     1            0
#>  9 2020-10-08 18:52:24 Hyloiri… "Anedonia Frag… https://hylo…     6            3
#> 10 2020-10-08 03:11:18 eternal… "\"For this pr… https://room…    12            0
#> # … with 190 more rows