Shiny Starter

This is a Shiny template based off of Shiny's KMeans clustering example and Bootstrap's Jumbotron example. As examples, it includes a Leaflet map and a K-means clustering interactive graph.

Essentially, it's a starter app to more easily create Shiny apps using plain HTML instead of their templating system.

Getting started

Install the Shiny and Leaflet R packages:

install.packages(c('shiny','leaflet'), repos='http://cran.rstudio.com/')

This app should work out of the box when running it from RStudio.

Structure

The app is structured as follows:

├── README.md
├── data
│   └── test.csv
├── server.R
├── template.html
├── ui.R
└── www
    ├── css
    │   └── css.css
    ├── favicon.ico
    ├── images
    └── js
        └── js.js

In general, the www directory has the files the webpage will directly call, while the data directory is where the data resides, to be processed by R.

Deployment to Linux

To deploy an R app onto a real Linux server, do the following:

• Install R and Shiny. Assuming you're using Ubuntu, this tutorial from DigitalOcean is great.
• Install nginx and set up a reverse proxy to map (for example, in the following) the /shiny path to the Shiny server.

map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
  default upgrade;
  ''      close;
}

server {
   charset utf-8;
   client_max_body_size 128M;
   sendfile off;

   listen 80 default_server; ## listen for ipv4

   root PATH_TO_A_NON-Shiny_APP;

   location / {
      index index.html;
      autoindex on;
   }

   location /shiny/ {
      rewrite ^/shiny/(.*)$ /$1 break;
      proxy_pass http://localhost:3838;
      proxy_redirect http://localhost:3838/ $scheme://$host/shiny/;
      proxy_http_version 1.1;
      proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
      proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
      proxy_read_timeout 20d;
      proxy_buffering off;
   }
}

• Copy over your code (or this project) to srv/shiny-server (the default location, you can change it in the Shiny server configuration in /etc/shiny-server/shiny-server.conf) and restart Shiny using sudo service shiny-server restart. You should be able to see your site at http://YOUSITE/shiny/.

Notes and Quirks

• Shiny has a quirk whereby if any inputs or forms are on the page and not used in Shiny (such as an errant search box), it will completely kill Shiny interactivity. Don't use non-Shiny inputs or forms. See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/shiny-discuss/vd_nB-BH8sw
• Shiny seems to use HTML ids to map its input$variable_name variables.
• Shiny already includes jQuery by default, and adding your own jQuery will break the site.

Links

• Shiny documentation
• Leaflet on Shiny
• JavaScript events - these can be used, for example, to show a "Loading" bar when Shiny is processing data. Two example event handlers, just printing to the console, are added in www/js/js.js