Shiny App-Packages

Getting your app into an R package

Author

Martin Frigaard

Published

2024-12-20

Welcome!



Under Development

This resource is currently being revised to include recent changes in the Shiny development landscape (Positron, AI tools, etc.). While most of the information in the ‘Introduction’ and ‘App-packages’ sections will remain unchanged, new sections are being written on:

  1. Debugging
  2. Testing
  3. Deployment
  4. Frameworks

Thank you for your patience!

Develop your Shiny application as an R package.


Shiny combines the power of R’s statistical capabilities with the interactivity of a web-based application.

R packages are collections of pre-built, self-contained code, data, and documentation designed to perform operations or accomplish tasks beyond the capabilities of the R language.

What’s in the book

URLs

This book is a resource to help ‘connect the dots’ between building scalable Shiny applications and writing R packages. Adopting R package development practices in the early stages of your Shiny app will improve the reusability, maintainability, and shareability of all your hard work.

The code and data originate from the excellent Building Web Applications with Shiny (BWAS) course. If you’re new to Shiny development this course is a great place to start. The four learning modules will provide a solid understanding for many of the topics covered in this book.

What’s not in the book

This book isn’t a replacement for Mastering Shiny or R Packages, 2ed (or Writing R Extensions). I highly suggest bookmarking thse resources to return and read when you’d like to learn more about package development.

I also won’t be recommending a particular Shiny framework or package, but I’ll cover a few popular choices, show what they’re doing ‘under the hood,’ and let you decide if you’d like to adopt their practices.

What I assume about you

If you’re reading this, I assume you’re comfortable with R, Posit Workbench, Shiny, and the tidyverse. Maybe you haven’t built a ton of applications, but you understand reactivity, and you’re comfortable with the core Shiny concepts (i.e., the UI, server, *_Input(), *_Output(), and render_* functions, etc.).

Code examples

The code files for each chapter are stored in GitHub repository. Major code changes are stored in branches. Whenever a new branch is used, you’ll see the Git Branch icon with a link to the repo/branch in the margin.

See the <branch> branch of sap.

In an effort to make the code and examples more accessible and easy to use, I’ve also created the shinypak package:

Example:

# install.packages('pak')
pak::pak('mjfrigaard/shinypak')
shinypak::launch('09.2_inst-bslib')