Blog post: Launching R Workers Over HTTP: Posit Workbench, Kubernetes, and Any Job API

[shikokuchuo]

Draft blog post announcing mirai's HTTP launcher — target publish date: Tues 21 July

What this covers

• mirai's HTTP launcher (introduced in 2.6.0) and the new headers argument in 2.7.1, now the primary way to authenticate.
• Zero-config launching on Posit Workbench (2026.01+).
• A worked Kubernetes Jobs recipe: build a Job manifest, POST it to the in-cluster API with the service-account bearer token, and let daemons dial back to host_url().
• Notes on credentials-as-functions and TLS for untrusted networks.

Verification

The Kubernetes example was reproduced end-to-end against a local kind cluster (built an R+mirai image, RBAC + in-cluster driver pod, ran the exact recipe): 4 daemon Jobs were created via the API, all 4 daemons connected, and mirai_map() distributed work across the 4 daemon pods. Frontmatter passes scripts/validate-blog-posts.py.

[netlify]

✅ Deploy Preview for posit-open-source canceled.

Name	Link
🔨 Latest commit	8f475a4
🔍 Latest deploy log	https://app.netlify.com/projects/posit-open-source/deploys/6a58d9766809980008c22b14

[github-actions]

Publishing checklist

• Get a review — you're responsible for requesting one. Any colleague with Write access can approve; if your PR touches files outside a post folder, the assigned code owner's approval is also required before merging
• Check your post — once the deploy preview is ready, a comment will appear with direct links to your post
• Check the blog listing — confirm your post appears with the correct title, image, and description
• Merge — once everything looks good and you have an approving review, merge to main

[github-actions]

🚀 Deployed on https://6a58da43d179840f4220c388--posit-open-source.netlify.app

[github-actions]

Blog YAML Checks

content/blog/mirai-http-launcher/index.md

• ⚠️ Can't find people page for Michael Mayer (expected content/people/michael-mayer/).

Summary: 1 files checked, 1 warnings

[github-actions]

Preview links

• /blog/2026-07-21_mirai-http-launcher/

Blog listing: https://6a58da43d179840f4220c388--posit-open-source.netlify.app/blog/
Full site: https://6a58da43d179840f4220c388--posit-open-source.netlify.app

[hadley]

Unfortunately I don't have time for a full review, but my main comment is that we only have so many opportunities to get these tools in front of people's eyeballs, and I worry we're doing too many too small blog posts rather than accumulating small things so we can do a single blog post that makes more of a splash.

This also feels maybe a little too AI written.

[shikokuchuo]

I can totally hold off and repackage into something else. The thought behind this was:

• have posts about things people want to do, not just package releases
• this is new to the ecosystem, we want people to discover
• nice tie in to Posit Workbench (removes all the complexity for end-users)