Authentication & Options

Set up a valid authentication to the ‘HERE’ REST APIs and optionally configure a proxy.

Application credentials

In order to use the functionality of the hereR package, application credentials for a HERE project must be provided. The HERE application credentials (API Key) can be obtained for free as follows:

  1. Go to developer.here.com
  2. Sign up for a HERE developer account, which automatically creates a new project
  3. Click ‘REST: Generate APP’
  4. Click ‘Create API Key’ and copy the key

The API key is set for the current R session and will be used to authenticate in the requests to the HERE REST APIs (250K free transactions per month). To set the key, please use:

library(hereR)
set_key("<YOUR API KEY>")

Alternatively, the key can be exported directly to the environment: export HERE_API_KEY="<YOUR-KEY>"

Information about requests

By default, the hereR package does not print messages with information about the requests sent and the data received from to the HERE APIs. If this information should be printed for the current R session, use:

set_verbose(TRUE)

Use set_Verbose(FALSE) to set the hereR package to be quiet again.

Rate limits

For freemium licenses the number of requests per second (RPS) is limited, use set_freemium(FALSE) to turn off rate limits for accounts with paid plans.

The limits are:

Service Max RPS
Geocoding & Search 5
Multi Reverse Geocoding 1
Vector Tile 10
Map Tile 30
Map Image 2
Routing 10
Matrix Routing 1
Isoline Routing 1
Route Matching 1
Advanced Datasets 10
Waypoints Sequence 1
Transit 10
Intermodal 5

Proxy

If you are working behind a corporate proxy the requests sent by hereR might fail with timeout errors. In this case, consider setting a global proxy for R. Open the R environment file file.edit('~/.Renviron') and add your proxy configuration:

http_proxy=http://user:passwd@proxy.dom.com:port/
https_proxy=https://user:passwd@proxy.dom.com:port/

Note: On RStudio Server this file is located at R_HOME/etc/Renviron.site.

Remove credentials

To remove previously set credentials from the current R session use unset_key(). For overwriting the application credentials use again the set_key() function.

Reference