Making Shiny Apps Public
Last updated on 2024-02-20 | Edit this page
Overview
Questions
- How do I show the world my Shiny apps?
Objectives
- Publish your Shiny app
Shinyapps.io
In order to make your Shiny apps available to the world, we need to put them somewhere publicly accessible on the Worldwide Web. In order to do this, we need a Shiny Server - a server running R that knows how to deploy Shiny apps. While those of you with a server and know-how can deploy your own Shiny Server (it’s free!), that’s generally not an option for everyone.
For our purposes, we’re going to use Posit’s shinyapps.io, a free Shiny App hosting site that is integrated into R Studio.
Sign up for shinyapps.io
Go to shinyapps.io and take the steps to register for an account.
Other hosting options if you don’t run a server
There are other ways, but they require more technical expertise. If you are at or affiliated with a university, contact your scientific computing staff. They can setup a Shiny Server and Rstudio Server so you can easily deploy apps by uploading them.
If you don’t have that option, and shinyapps.io is not enough for you, you can deploy your app with Heroku or Digital Ocean. It’s going to take some work, patience, and desire to learn more about systems administration. Skills well worth learning.
Deploying Your App to Shinyapps.io
How to Publish your Shiny
App from Dean Attali
Deploying your app from within RStudio is fairly simple. Within
Rstudio, click the funky botton noted above (to the left of your code
pane) and select Publish Application. You will be walked
through steps to connect your instance of RStudio to shinyapps.io and then the app will
upload.
Run your app. If it has a problem, log into shinyapps.io and inspect the logfile for your app to see what went wrong.
