Is there really no mature client to interact with AWS services from R (or more simply, just S3 buckets)?
I see 7 or so packages listed in Scott & co’s taskview (http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/WebTechnologies.html), but most of those with S3 access are just wrappers to the aws cli tool that must thus be installed separately, and it appears none are on CRAN. (The one that was, awsTools, is now deprecated even in it’s dev version in favor of the author’s new https://github.com/armstrtw/Rawscli, which looks like just another thin wrapper around aws cli.
My ideal would be some actively maintained CRAN version via httr implementation; this gist from Hadley looks pretty close for the S3 side of things: https://gist.github.com/hadley/5532482. (Perhaps the XML dependency could now be swapped out for xml2). Currently this implements only the GET method, and looks like the response object handling needs to be tweaked a bit to work. It looks like POST methods (and maybe PUT as well?) require rather more complex creation of signing keys described in the Amazon documentation to work: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/sig-v4-authenticating-requests.html
Anyway, is anyone familiar with better options or would this be a reasonable project that would catch anyone’s interest?