I am developing a shiny app and since I wanted to use automated testing and documentation of the function, I started to develop the interface within a package (as recommended here ).
I develop this shiny app within RStudio and I have a server.R
file which I can click on the Run App button within RStudio and everything works. I commit my package to a github repository and from this point I want to install it on my R shiny server using devtools
and install_github
function.
Now I am wondering how to start my app within the server. I was naively thinking to install the package and pointing to the server.R
file, but this is somehow not working. Not sure where the problems are.
My second try was creating a file called app.R
in a folder accessible by the shiny server and in this file I basically load my package, shiny and other needed packages but it somehow complains because of missing variables...
Can somebody give me an advice? I am also happy to answer any question since I am not sure how to ask for this problem properly. Thanks in advance.
EDIT Deploying to shiny server
Since Colin D was asking in the comments, how to deploy these packages on a shiny server, I wanted to demonstrate how I do this.
First of all I install my package on the shiny server directly via the command line as root with the following command.
su - -c "R -e \"devtools::install_github('user/shinypackage')\""
The next step is to change the owner of the package folder
chown -R shiny:shiny /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/shinypackage/
Then I restart the shiny server since this was sometimes problematic with caching or so.
systemctl restart shiny-server
These are the steps I do when I update my shiny app. I do this normally again as root in a single line
su - -c "R -e \"devtools::install_github('user/shinypackage')\"" & chown -R shiny:shiny /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/shinypackage/ & systemctl restart shiny-server
One thing we still need to do is to setup the directory in the shiny-server.conf
file. I just added the package path+the application directory where the ui.R
and server.R
is saved.
location /shinypackage {
app_dir /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/shinypackage/application;
log_dir /var/log/shiny-server;
}
Then I have to restart the server again by using systemctl restart shiny-server
.
This is in use on a Ubuntu Server.
When I make shiny applications as a stand-alone package, I usually organize the files as so:
In the R directory:
ui.R
, server.R
, or global.R
files) launch_application
function The definition of launch_application
is similar to:
launch_application <- function(x, ...)
{
shiny::runApp(appDir = system.file("application", package = [my_pkg]),
...)
}
In the inst directory
application/server.R
application/ui.R
application/global.R
After building and installing the package, I then just need to run
library(my_pkg)
launch_application(...)
There is already an accepted answer with many votes, but I'd like to add a few things, so I'll answer myself as well. For more information, you can read my article Supplementing your R package with a Shiny app .
This is the folder structure I use:
- mypacakge
|- inst
|- myapp
|- ui.R
|- server.R
|- R
|- runApp.R
|- ...
|- DESCRIPTION
|- ...
Inside the R/
folder is where I place all the non-shiny code. The code for the shiny app itself lives in inst/
. The R/runApp.R
file is defined as
#' @export
runExample <- function() {
appDir <- system.file("myapp", package = "mypackage")
if (appDir == "") {
stop("Could not find myapp. Try re-installing `mypackage`.", call. = FALSE)
}
shiny::runApp(appDir, display.mode = "normal")
}
(You can see this in action; for example, shinyalert uses this structure for its demo app).
In a comment, you asked how can this be deployed on a shiny server. It's simple, you can simply have a file /srv/shiny-server/myapp.app.R
that calls and runs that package (after you've installed the package on the server):
dir <- system.file("myapp", package = "mypackage")
setwd(dir)
shiny::shinyAppDir(".")
(You can see this in action as well, code here )
A lot of packages with proof-of-concept Shiny demos are not designed for deployment on Shiny Server, but instead, include something like this in a function meant to be run from RStudio:
fooRun <- function() {
app <- shinyApp(appUI, appServer)
runApp(app, launch.browser = TRUE, ...)
}
This function won't work in Shiny Server (you can't run runApp
within runApp
) but it gives some clues as to how to create an app.R that can act as a placeholder to use in /srv/shiny-server/foo/app.R
library("foo")
shinyApp(ui = foo:::appUI, server = foo:::appServer)
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