1 Hello, world!

1.1 Python

Perhaps this is the simplest way to start from the Linux command line, nevertheless with Python,

python3 -m http.server 8000
firefox http://127.0.0.1:8000

which works with python3 -m http.server by default when the port number 8000 is available.

1.2 R

Our focus here is R with the following script.

httpuv::startServer("0.0.0.0", 8000, list(
  call = function(req) {
    list(
      status = 200L,
      headers = list("Content-Type" = "text/plain"),
      body = "Hello, world!"
    )
  })
)

Upon accessing http://127.0.0.1:8000, we see the message “Hello, world!”.

Below, we assume that our working directory is the source package,

2 Data source

We envisage a server from which data can be obtained, and two R packages plumber and httpuv are considered here.

2.1 A meta-analysis

The compressed data IL.18R1-1.tbl.gz is based on METAL1, involving study-[1|2|3] as follows,

SEPARATOR TAB
COLUMNCOUNTING STRICT
CHROMOSOMELABEL CHR
POSITIONLABEL POS
CUSTOMVARIABLE N
LABEL N as N
TRACKPOSITIONS ON
AVERAGEFREQ ON
MINMAXFREQ ON
ADDFILTER AF1 >= 0.001
ADDFILTER AF1 <= 0.999
MARKERLABEL SNP
ALLELELABELS A1 A2
EFFECTLABEL BETA
PVALUELABEL P
WEIGHTLABEL N
FREQLABEL AF1
STDERRLABEL SE
SCHEME STDERR
EFFECT_PRINT_PRECISION 8
STDERR_PRINT_PRECISION 8
GENOMICCONTROL OFF
LOGPVALUE ON
OUTFILE IL18R1B_dr- .tbl
PROCESS study-1-IL18R1B.fastGWA.gz
PROCESS study-2-IL18R1B.fastGWA.gz
PROCESS study-3-IL18R1B.fastGWA.gz
PROCESS study-1-IL18R1B-chrX.fastGWA.gz
PROCESS study-2-IL18R1B-chrX.fastGWA.gz
PROCESS study-3-IL18R1B-chrX.fastGWA.gz
ANALYZE HETEROGENEITY
CLEAR

Assuming the script is named IL.18R1.metal, IL.18R1-1.tbl.gz is generated from htslib, https://www.htslib.org/download/, as follows,

export protein=IL.18R1
metal ${protein}.metal 2>&1 | \
tee ${protein}-1.tbl.log
cat <(head -1 ${protein}-1.tbl) \
    <(sed '1d' ${protein}-1.tbl | \
sort -k1,1n -k2,2n) | \
bgzip -f > ${protein}-1.tbl.gz
tabix -S1 -s1 -b2 -e2 -f ${protein}-1.tbl.gz
rm ${protein}-1.tbl

The bgzipped data allows for access by genomic region as shown below.

2.2 plumber

Software library libsodium, https://doc.libsodium.org/, is required for its installation.

It is an API generator in R, which has been tested as follows.

get_data <- function(filename, region)
{
  query_result <- seqminer::tabix.read(filename, region)
  hdr <- c("Chromosome", "Position",
           "MarkerName", "Allele1", "Allele2", "Freq1", "FreqSE", "MinFreq", "MaxFreq",
           "Effect", "StdErr", "logP",
           "Direction", "HetISq", "HetChiSq", "HetDf", "logHetP", "N")
  df <- read.table(text = paste(query_result, collapse = "\n"), sep = "\t", col.names=hdr)
  return(df)
}

plbr <- plumber::Plumber$new()
plbr$handle("GET", "/tests", function(req, res) {
  protein <- req$args$protein
  region <- req$args$region
  if (is.null(protein) || is.null(region)) {
    res$status <- 400
    return(list(error = "Both 'protein' and 'region' must be provided"))
  }
  filename <- file.path("tests",paste0(protein,"-1.tbl.gz"))
  print(filename)
  if (!file.exists(filename)) {
    res$status <- 404
    return(list(error = paste("File for", protein, "not found")))
  }
  data <- get_data(filename, region)
  json_data <- jsonlite::toJSON(data, dataframe = "rows", na = "null")
  res$setHeader("Content-Type", "application/json")
  return(json_data)
})
options(width = 200)
filename <- file.path("tests","IL.18R1-1.tbl.gz")
region <- "2:102700000-103800000"
data <- get_data(filename, region)
head(data,1)
plbr$run(port = 8001)

Indeed we can see that the first line of data,

  Chromosome  Position         MarkerName Allele1 Allele2 Freq1 FreqSE MinFreq MaxFreq  Effect StdErr  logP   Direction HetISq HetChiSq HetDf logHetP     N
1          2 102700138 chr2:102700138_A_G       a       g 0.087 0.0207  0.0641  0.1376 -0.0566 0.0239 -1.75 -?-+n-?--n+   78.2   36.757     8  -4.894 12799

and

Running plumber API at http://127.0.0.1:8001
Running swagger Docs at http://127.0.0.1:8001/__docs__/

2.3 Data access

2.3.1 Browser/console

So we get query results in JSON format from

  • browser: http://localhost:8001/tests?protein=IL.18R1&region=2:102700000-103800000
  • command line interface: curl "http://localhost:8001/tests?protein=IL.18R1&region=2:102700000-103800000"

Additional work required to get output from curl to a tab-delimited data,

curl "http://localhost:8001/tests?protein=IL.18R1&region=2:102700000-103800000" | \
jq -r '.[0] |
   fromjson |
   .[] |
   [
     .Chromosome, .Position, .MarkerName, .Allele1, .Allele2, .Freq1,
     .Effect, .StdErr, .logP, .Direction, .HetISq, .HetChiSq, .HetDf, .logHetP, .N
   ] |
   @tsv'

where

  1. .[0]: Access the first element in the outer array (the string containing the JSON).
  2. fromjson: Parse the string into a JSON object.
  3. .[]: Iterate over the array inside the parsed JSON.
  4. [ … ]: Create an array of the values needed, each corresponds to a column in the TSV output.
  5. tsv?: Convert the array into tab-separated values.

Note also that only selected columns (as in 4) are kept. The simplest way to have the header is add it manually,

(
  echo "Chromosome|Position|MarkerName|Allele1|Allele2|Freq1|Effect|StdErr|logP|Direction|HetISq|HetChiSq|HetDf|logHetP|N" | \
  sed 's/|/\t/g'
  curl command as above.
)

2.3.2 R

The query above is easily furnished with curl:

tmp <- tempfile()
curl::curl_download("http://localhost:8001/tests?protein=IL.18R1&region=2:102700000-103800000", tmp)
df <- jsonlite::fromJSON(readLines(tmp)) |>
      jsonlite::fromJSON(flatten=TRUE) |>
      as.data.frame()
dim(df)

giving

[1] 4779   18

2.4 httpuv

The package gives a somewhat more involved version as follows,

dir.create("content/assets", recursive = TRUE)
dir.create("content/lib", recursive = TRUE)
s <- httpuv::startServer(
  host = "0.0.0.0", 
  port = 5000,
  app = list(
    call = function(req) {
      list(
        status = 200L,
        headers = list(
          'Content-Type' = 'text/html',
          'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' = '*',
          'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' = 'GET, POST, OPTIONS',
          'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' = 'Content-Type'
        ),
        body = "Hello world!"
      )
    },
    staticPaths = list(
      "/assets" = "content/assets/", # Static assets
      "/lib" = httpuv::staticPath("content/lib", indexhtml = FALSE),
      "/lib/dynamic" = httpuv::excludeStaticPath()
    ),
    staticPathOptions = httpuv::staticPathOptions(indexhtml = TRUE)
  )
)
cat("Server running at http://0.0.0.0:5000\n")
s$stop()

so mappings are created from content/[assets, lib] to assets and lib, while httpuv::excludeStaticPath() indicates that requests to /lib/dynamic will not be served as static files but could be handled dynamically by the app logic.

References

1.
Willer, C. J., Li, Y. & Abecasis, G. R. METAL: Fast and efficient meta-analysis of genomewide association scans. Bioinformatics 26, 2190–1 (2010).