Introduction to Shiny

Last updated on 2024-02-20 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 35 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • What is a Shiny App?

Objectives

  • Explain what a Shiny app can do.
  • Demonstrate the basic building blocks of a Shiny app.

Introduction to Shiny

As many of us work in R, we often want to make our work viewable to others in a broad audience. There are tools, such as Quarto that allow you to generate rich static reports that can be re-made every time your data updates (worth digging into another time!). They do not let other people play with the data and visualizations you are working on without their digging into the guts of R.

The answer is the creation of web applications. Shiny is a package that allows one to create web applications swiftly to explore and interact with data. At their bare minimum, they allow for some simple selection of subsets of data and re-visualizations. At their most complex… well, chekc out some of the submissions to the annual R Shiny Competition.

Shiny in a Nutshell from Dean AttaliShiny in a Nutshell from Dean Attali

In a nutshell, we write Shiny apps in R code. Those apps are then hosted on a server that is running an instance of a Shiny Server. Note, we will use a public Shiny server for this lesson, shinyapps.io. A user goes to the URL of a shiny site. The server processes the R code and delivers a user interface.

Discussion: Some example Shiny Sites

Here are a few Shiny websites. Take some time to explore them. What do you like about them? What do you not like about them? What possibilities do you see for your own work?

Creating a Shiny App

Let’s start by creating a new project called shiny-geospatial. Within that project, create a folder called data and download FIXME into that folder. Now, create a new script. Call it app.R. Save it in the same director as your .Rproj file.

Callout

While you can put a Shiny app into any file you like, once you use it with a Shiny server, and you want to go to http://myshinyserver.com/my_cool_app/ to run your app, the server will only recognize one of two configurations.

  1. The app is in a file called app.R in your top level directory. This file will have your entire app.

  2. The app is split between ui.R and server.R - which have those two pieces respectively.

Otherwise, nothing will load. You can create other R files with apps in them to test out different things, but, they will not be recognized by a server. This is not to say you won’t put pieces of your app in different R files - we will talk about this later - but you will call them within your app.R file using source().

Note, you could have also created a Shiny project from Rstudio. But, this would initialize with a pre-built Shiny app in it. Which is fun to play with, but, can be confusing to then re-edit later.

The Anatomy of a Shiny App

A shiny app consists of four distinct parts. Here they all are, laid out. This app will actually run, although it will produce a blank app. Here’s the whole piece laid out. We will look at each one in turn.

R 

# 1. Preamble
library(shiny)

# 2. Define a User Interface
ui <- fluidPage()

# 3. define a server
server <- function(input, output) {}

# 4. Call shinyApp() to run your app
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

First, the preamble. This is code to run at the top of the app (including loading the Shiny package) to prepare objects, color palettes, or other things that you do not need dynamically created or recreated later. You can even write this in another R script - say, create_objects.R and then run them in the preamble like so:

R 

source("create_objects.R")

Second, the User Interface.

R 

# 2. Define a User Interface
ui <- fluidPage()

Here, we create an object called ui for later use. We are using the fluidPage() function. What does that do? The helpfile tells us this is a function that creates a fluid page layout, and we can add a title, theme, and more. What does that mean? Let’s find out.

R 

ui

We see that fluidPage() has generated some HTML code. This is the core of Shiny - functions that generate code to be interpreted by a web browser.

Note, because of the (), we can see that this is a function. Shiny user interfaces are built by a series of nested functions, each one generating more and more HTML code, nested by order of how the functions are written.

Third we have the server:

R 

# 3. define a server
server <- function(input, output) {}

This is, at the moment, just an empty function definition with two arguments. What are those arguments? Where do they come from? Where are they going? In Shiny, these are both defined by the environment. As we will see input is a list modified by the ui. And output is also a list that will be modified by the server.

The final section is the call to Shiny. It runs the app itself. So, you can call this to run the app. Note that the ui and server are inputs to the arguments ui and server. This means that, if you wanted, you could have named them something else, but, the community seems to have coalesced around using these object names.

R 

# 4. Call shinyApp() to run your app
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

Do you need to run this line of code every time? In Rstudio, no. As long as it sees this is a shiny app, there will be some options to run the app in your window

click to run a shiny app

Which will also start a server. You can stop the server at any time by either hitting Ctrl-C in the console, or, clicking the Stop button in RStudio.

stop a shiny app in Rstudio

Key Points

  • Create a file called app.R to make a shiny app.
  • Make sure this file starts with the four key parts of a Shiny app
    • The preamble.
    • The creation of a UI.
    • The creation of a server function with input and output as arguments.
    • A call to run shinyApp() at the end.