Enter passwords interactively in R or R Studio (Server)?

Question

Is there a way in R to enter passwords interactively to the command line and hide them from the screen? I know there's readLine, but I do not know passwords can be hidden there. Assume you want to connect to a database using ROracle or RMySQL and do not want to store the password in a script but rather make the user enter it every time a query is executed.

Yes, we had a similar question around here, but I feel that the situation has changed and it's worth to address to problem again. Unfortunately tcltk won't work on RStudio (Server).

However I have seen the folks at R Studio found a solution for their version control support. I remember previous versions where I could see my repo password every time I enter it in R Studio, but now that seems to be fixed. I know it's likely R Studio technique, but is there a way mortal R users can access it when working with R Studio Server?

Answer 1

Actually R Studio (Server) provides a nice solution. You can access it by using .rs functions. They provide an undocumented password function which is really nice though there's no guaranteed support forever and a day:

.rs.askForPassword("foo")

You can find the the original hint from RStudio's Josh here: http://support.rstudio.org/help/discussions/questions/1448-password-interaction-with-dbs-on-rstudio-server

EDIT: As of 2015 there is another nice solution to enter password interactively. You could use shiny to have a little web based window with a password form. This discussion I had with @hadley shows an example snippet: https://github.com/rstats-db/RPostgres/issues/26

EDIT: As of 2017 there is another update to this. @m-dz pointed us to this: rstudioapi::askForPassword("Enter your pw") as well as getPass::getPass() from the R Studio Support webpage. Plus, I also realized that there is .rs.api.askForPassword() which is equivalent to the initially suggested call - at least as far as I've seen.