Exporting Shiny apps with Shinylive

I was playing around with Shinylive but encounter some issues when using it, here’s the code that worked. It uses Docker to make it reproducible.

Copy all the following files in the same directory:

app/app.R

Some hello world app for testing. Note that this is under the app/ directory, you must create this file under an app/ directory.

library(shiny)

# Define UI
ui <- fluidPage(
    titlePanel("Hello World Shiny App"),
    
    sidebarLayout(
        sidebarPanel(
            textInput("name", "Enter your name:", "World")
        ),
        
        mainPanel(
            h3("Greeting:"),
            textOutput("greeting")
        )
    )
)

# Define server logic
server <- function(input, output) {
    output$greeting <- renderText({
        paste("Hello,", input$name, "!")
    })
}

# Run the application
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

convert.R

Simple script to convert the Shiny app to Shinylive.

shinylive::export("/app", "site")

Dockerfile

FROM r-base

# install OS requirements
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    libarchive-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

# install R requirements
COPY install.R /_shinylive/install.R
RUN Rscript /_shinylive/install.R

# copy the converter script
COPY convert.R /_shinylive/convert.R

WORKDIR /_shinylive

ENTRYPOINT ["Rscript", "/_shinylive/convert.R"]

Exporting to Shinylive

# build the docker image
docker build -t shinylive .

# export app.R
docker run -v $(pwd):/app shinylive

Once the docker run command finishes, you’ll see a site/ directory.

Then, you can run the exported app with any HTTP server. If you have R, you can use httpuv:

# install httpuv
Rscript -e 'install.packages("httpuv", repos="https://cran.rstudio.com")'

# run httpuv - and open the printed URL
Rscript -e 'httpuv::runStaticServer("site/")'

If you have a Python installation:

# open: http://localhost:8000
python -m http.server 8000 --directory site