lemur is an R package that provides a wrapper for the OpenAI GPT API. It is a repackaging of code I originally developed for the GPTscreenR package. I created this package for my personal use and it is not planned to ever be released to CRAN.

You can install the development version of lemur from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("wilkox/lemur")

Using lemur requires an OpenAI API key, which you must store in an R environmental variable called OPENAI_API_KEY. OpenAI charges fees to use their API. To obtain and set up an API key:

1. Create an OpenAI account, if you don’t have one already.
2. Once you have created and signed in to your account, go to the View API Keys page.
3. Click on the ‘Create new secret key’ button.
4. Give your new key a name, for example ‘lemur’, and click ‘Create secret key’.
5. The page will display your new secret API key. You must copy the key now, as it will never be displayed again.
6. Store your API key in an R environmental variable by adding the following line to your .Renviron file: OPENAI_API_KEY=<your secret API key goes here>. There are a few different ways to edit this file:
   1. On any operating system, you can use the function usethis::edit_r_environ() from the usethis package to open and edit your .Renviron file.
   2. On macOS or Linux, you can create or edit a file in your home directory called ~/.Renviron.
   3. You can also make an .Renviron file for a particular project. I strongly recommend that you do not check this file into a version control system like git, as this means other people with access to the repository (including the public, if the repository is publicly accessible) can see your secret key.

To check that you have set the environmental variable successfully, open a new R session and load lemur with library(lemur). You should see the following message:

✔ The `OPENAI_API_KEY` environmental variable is set

If instead you see:

✖ The `OPENAI_API_KEY` environmental variable is not set

this means the environmental variable has not been set correctly. Note that this does not check whether or not you have stored a valid key.