Install shiny on remote Debian machine with R version 3.1.1

Question

I am trying to host an shiny app on an remote Debian machine. Yet, i have encountered an R version issue when installing shiny package. I will basically walk through the steps that I took in the process:

After SSH into the VM, I install and update the r-base:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r-base
sudo apt-get install r-base-dev

The latest version I can get for R is 3.1.1. Then, I was trying to install "shiny" package as root by the following command:

sudo su - -c "R -e \"install.packages('shiny', repos='http://cran.rstudio.com/')\""

Then, I was getting the error message like:

Installing package into ‘/usr/local/lib/R/site-library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Warning: unable to access index for repository http://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib
Warning message:
package ‘shiny’ is not available (for R version 3.1.1) 

Is there any work-around on this issue? Such as starch the apt-get to install the latest R version rather than 3.1.1? Or possibly install shiny from a Github repo? Please help! Thanks!

Answer 1

You should be able to get the R package yourself, rather than using apt-get. This way you can choose which release to install. For example:

wget http://cran.rstudio.com/src/base/R-3/R-3.2.2.tar.gz 
tar zxvf R-3.2.2.tar.gz; cd R-3.2.2/ 
./configure; make; 
sudo make install

Then you can get shiny through the terminal as well, rather than within R:

wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/shiny_0.13.2.tar.gz
sudo R CMD INSTALL shiny_0.13.2.tar.gz

• credit to Huiong Tian, from whom I learned this a while back: http://withr.me/install-shiny-server-on-raspberry-pi/