Installing shiny server on Debian VM

Question

I was trying to host shiny app on an offline Debian VM. So, first, I install R-version 3.1.1 with apt-get on the VM:

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

Then, I scp all tar.gz files (Including all dependencies) of "shiny" package to the VM from my local and install them successfully with "R CMD ...". After that, I ran the following command to install "gdebi" and used it to install "shiny-server-1.3.0.403-amd64.deb" for shiny server.

$ sudo apt-get install gdebi-core
$ sudo gdebi shiny-server-1.3.0.403-amd64.deb

It returned error at the first time indicating the missing of dependencies:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree        
Reading state information... Done
Building data structures... Done 
Building data structures... Done 
This package is uninstallable
Dependency is not satisfiable: libssl0.9.8

Then, I followed another post to add the following line to the "etc/apt/sources.list" file and then install the missing dependencies with "apt-get":

 deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid-security main

 $ sudo apt-get install libssl0.9.8
 Reading package lists... Done
 Building dependency tree       
 Reading state information... Done
 The following NEW packages will be installed:
 libssl0.9.8
 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 26 not upgraded.
 Need to get 988 kB of archives.
 After this operation, 2,408 kB of additional disk space will be used.
 WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
 libssl0.9.8
 Install these packages without verification? [y/N] y
 Get:1 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security/main libssl0.9.8 amd64 0.9.8k-7ubuntu8.27 [988 kB]
 Fetched 988 kB in 1s (902 kB/s)      
 Preconfiguring packages ...
 Selecting previously unselected package libssl0.9.8.
 (Reading database ... 46468 files and directories currently installed.)
 Preparing to unpack .../libssl0.9.8_0.9.8k-7ubuntu8.27_amd64.deb ...
 Unpacking libssl0.9.8 (0.9.8k-7ubuntu8.27) ...
 Setting up libssl0.9.8 (0.9.8k-7ubuntu8.27) ...
 Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.19-18+deb8u3) ...

It seems worked and I installed "shiny-server-1.3.0.403-amd64.deb":

$ sudo gdebi shiny-server-1.3.0.403-amd64.deb
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree        
Reading state information... Done
Building data structures... Done 
Building data structures... Done 

Shiny Server
Shiny Server is a server program from RStudio, Inc. that makes Shiny applications available over the web. Shiny is a web application framework for the R statistical computation language.
Do you want to install the software package? [y/N]:y
Selecting previously unselected package shiny-server.
(Reading database ... 46487 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack shiny-server-1.3.0.403-amd64.deb ...
Unpacking shiny-server (1.3.0.403) ...
Setting up shiny-server (1.3.0.403) ...
Creating user shiny
grep: /etc/init/shiny-server.conf: No such file or directory
Adding LANG to /etc/init.d/shiny-server, setting to en_US.UTF-8

Yet, when I tried to "stop/start" shiny server from terminal, cli can't recognize the command:

$ sudo stop shiny-server
sudo: stop: command not found

I am wondering whether I installed the server right? How can I "start/stop" shiny-server?

Answer 1

I've been using shiny-server this way on Debian Wheezy but switched to self-compiling when I upgraded to Debian Jessie, since this was the recommended route per RStudio Documentation.

To answer your problem, shiny-server is managed using a init.d script. To start the server you should run /etc/init.d/shiny-server start or service shiny-server start as root (sudo).

Answer 2

This is not a Shiny problem, just you are missing the command , stop is an option for the command service

You should use:

sudo service start shiny-server

to start it

sudo service stop shiny-server

to stop it