Shiny Serving Demo

This is a demo project that shows how to serve a Shiny app from a Renku V2 project. It uses the rocker shiny Docker base image and makes some modifications necessary for compatibility with Renku sessions.

You can see it in action at https://renkulab.io/v2/projects/cramakri/shiny-demo.

Serving your own shiny app

This project serves a "hello-world" Shiny example app. To serve your own app, you can clone this repo, add your app, and then configure a Renku V2 session launcher.

Adding your app

Clone this repo and replace the code in the src/r/app folder with your app.

After doing that, you should build the image and test that the app works. This requires Docker installed on your machine, but it will help you debug problems quickly.

For example, you can build and run with the following commands on Macs with Apple Silicon processors (for other machines, the build command might be different):

docker buildx build -t renku/shiny-session --platform linux/amd64 .
docker run --rm -ti -e RENKU_BASE_URL_PATH="/test-app" -p 3838:3838 renku/shiny-session

If everything worked correctly, you will be able to connect a web browser to

http://localhost:3838/test-app/

And you should see your app there.

Renku session launcher

Once your app runs locally, you are ready to serve it from Renku. To do this, you will need to add a session launcher to a Renku V2 project and configure it with the following pieces of information:

• the container image URL
• the port
• UID and GID for the container

This repository is set up to build a Docker image on GitHub. Make sure all of your changes have been committed and then push to a GitHub repo.

In the web page for your repo, you should see a section called Packages in the right-hand side of the page for your repo. Click there to get the URL for the image (you will probably want to most recent one).

It will look something like: ghcr.io/swissdatasciencecenter/demo-shiny-serve:sha-71a15ca

The other pieces of information are fixed:

• Port: 3838
• UID: 997 (the shiny user in the Rocker image)
• GID: 997

With that, you should have a session launcher that serves your Shiny app from Renku!

References

This project builds on The Rocker Shiny Docker image, which is designed to run the Shiny Server. Here are links to documentation for the Rocker image and Shiny Server. You may find them helpful for more advanced use cases.

• https://rocker-project.org/images/versioned/shiny.html
• https://docs.posit.co/shiny-server/
• https://github.com/rstudio/shiny-server/