Rumba

Rumba is an R Shiny app for managing other R Shiny apps behind a Microsoft IIS instance.

For each R Shiny app it handles:

1. Starting and stopping a R workers for apps, on demand.
2. Defining and destroying an IIS Web Farm containing those R workers.
3. Creating and removing an IIS Application Request Routing rewrite rule for a site to point a path at that web farm.

Requirements

• R and certain packages (tested with R 4.0)
• Microsoft IIS 7 or later (tested with IIS 10.0)
• IIS Application Request Routing 3.0 or later

rumba.yml - per app config

Each app directory must contain a rumba.yml file that, at a minimum, defines a webPath.

# an example rumba.yml file
webPath: my_cool_app

Setting	Example	Default	Description
webPath	my_cool_app		The URL path that will be used for the app. This example might route "https://example.com/my_cool_app" to the R app. Must be set. Can only include lowercase letters (a-z), numbers (0-9) and underscores (_).
workerCount	5	2	The number of R workers to start for this app. Must be between 1 and 9.
basePort	5001	Dynamic	The start of local port range that the R workers will use. Must be in 5001-6999. If you don't explicitly set a port, then your application will be allocated a range in 7001-12001
allow	HollowMen	Empty	One or more Rumba Authorization Groups. See the Authorization section

config.yml - Rumba config

Setting	Default	Description
iisApplicationHostConfig	C:/Windows/system32/inetsrv/config/applicationHost.config	The IIS configuration file that Rumba will try to define Web Farms in.
iisSitePath	C:/inetpub/wwwroot/	The physical path that Rumba will try to create sub-directories, containing web.config files with rewrite rules, in.
appsDir	apps	Where Rumba will look for app directories. Each app directory must contain a valid rumba.yml file, as described above.

Authorization

By default Rumba will not touch authorization settings. However, you can choose to define groups of Active Directory Users and Roles/Groups and only permit access to these on an app-by-app basis.

In authz_groups/HollowMen.csv:

sAMAccountName,objectType,addedAt
ab123456,user,2020-10-18T10:14:21Z

In your app's rumba.yml:

# an example rumba.yml file
webPath: my_cool_app
allow:
  - HollowMen

Be aware that if allow is defined in a rumba.yml, Rumba will clear any existing Authorization rules and replace them its own.

Alternatives

Assuming you're looking for some way to easily configure and run a bunch of R Shiny apps on your own webserver, with some control over scaling:

• If you're able to setup Docker and Java, then ShinyProxy.

• If you have at least $15,000 then RStudio Connect.