Authorization for accessing BigQuery from R session on server

Question

I am using R and package bigrquery to access Bigquery from an R session. This works great as long as I am on my local machine. However, when I try to access Bigquery from R on a remote server it does not work at all.

I tried to copy the .httr-oauth file into my home directory on the server but this does not work. I get the error message:

Auto-refreshing stale OAuth token. Error in refresh_oauth2.0(self$endpoint, self$app, self$credentials) : client error: (400) Bad Request

I really have no idea about where to store the necessary credentials and unfortunately I was not able to find anything useful about that by google-searching the topic.

Answer 1

By default httr, which is used by bigrquery for oauth, will look in the R session's current working directory for .httr-oauth. You can override this location with the following (perhaps putting it in your .Rprofile if you like):

options("httr_oauth_cache"="~/.httr-oauth")

But for error message you received, its seems like the location is not the issue and it might be easier to just redo the oauth flow on the remote server to cache a new credential. To trigger a new oauth flow on the remote server:

1. ensure the .httr-oauth file does not exist
2. restart R
3. perform one query with bigrquery

Note that if httr tries to redirect to localhost, you can force it to do an out-of-band oauth flow with:

options(httr_oob_default = TRUE)