Shiny Tools

Published

2025-03-18

Since I began writing this book1, the number of AI tools for building Shiny apps has grown significantly. The chapters in this section introduce a few popular tools I’ve personally used to develop applications. For a comprehensive review of LLMs R packages, please checkout the excellent Large Language Model tools for R book by Luis D. Verde Arregoitia.

Given the rapidly evolving landscape and nature of these tools, I expect these chapters to change frequently. Please open a GitHub issue if there is anything outdated, incorrect, or missing.

The applications in Chapter 19 (shinyapps.io) can be accessed with the launch() or get() functions from the shinypak R package:

# install.packages('pak')
pak::pak('mjfrigaard/shinypak')
library(shinypak)

Chapter 19 applications:

list_apps(regex = '^19')
## # A tibble: 1 × 2
##   branch         last_updated       
##   <chr>          <dttm>             
## 1 19_shinyappsio 2025-03-11 07:30:00

Docker dives into:

The applications in Chapter 20 (Docker) can be accessed with the launch() or get() functions from the shinypak R package:

# install.packages('pak')
pak::pak('mjfrigaard/shinypak')
library(shinypak)

Chapter 20 applications:

list_apps(regex = '^20')
## # A tibble: 1 × 2
##   branch    last_updated       
##   <chr>     <dttm>             
## 1 20_docker 2025-03-11 07:31:20

The GitHub Actions chapter includes three examples of CI/CD workflows:

The applications in Chapter 21 (GitHub Actions) can be accessed with the launch() or get() functions from the shinypak R package:

# install.packages('pak')
pak::pak('mjfrigaard/shinypak')
library(shinypak)

Chapter 21 applications:

list_apps(regex = '^21')
## # A tibble: 3 × 2
##   branch                last_updated       
##   <chr>                 <dttm>             
## 1 21.1_gha-style        2025-03-11 07:32:21
## 2 21.2_gha-shiny-deploy 2025-03-11 07:34:02
## 3 21.3_gha-shiny-docker 2025-03-11 07:35:53

pkgdown describes:

The applications in Chapter 22 (pkgdown) can be accessed with the launch() or get() functions from the shinypak R package:

# install.packages('pak')
pak::pak('mjfrigaard/shinypak')
library(shinypak)

Chapter 22 applications:

list_apps(regex = '^22')
## # A tibble: 1 × 2
##   branch     last_updated       
##   <chr>      <dttm>             
## 1 22_pkgdown 2025-03-13 06:20:26

Shiny Assistant

The Shiny Assistant is a browser-based LLM chat tool you can use to help build a Shiny app. The UI gives you the ability to submit prompts (questions or instructions), view the code, and launch the application. 26  Shiny Assistant covers:

ellmer

The ellmer package provides easy access to many LLMs in the R environment (Positron or RStudio).

shinychat

shinychat is…

chores

The chores package…

“Think of AI tools as a friend who is a know-it-all, over-confident, presumptuous, and lacks self-awareness. Despite these imperfections, they remain your friend.”

  1. I put the first ‘complete’ edition online in late 2023.↩︎