Getting started with Shiny

Overview

This article will show you how to publish an R App with Shiny in Domino 3.0+

In this tutorial you will:

• create a project and set it up for App publishing
• publish a simple two file Shiny App to the Domino Launchpad
• observe how other users in Domino can use the App

You'll be working with the Telephones by region example from the Shiny gallery. In this example, the application serves an interactive bar chart of consumer telephones by region from 1951 to 1961.

It will take approximately 10 minutes to get this example running in Domino.

 

Set up project

The first step is creating a project with the settings and content you need to publish your App.

1. From the Lab, click Projects.
2. Click New Project.
3. Give your project an informative name, choose the Private visibility setting, then click Create Project.
4. Click Settings in the project sidebar, then set the Compute environment to Domino Analytics Distribution Py3.6 R3.4. Read Domino standard environments to learn more about the contents of this base image.
   
   
5. Click Files in the project sidebar, then click Add File.
6. Name the file server.R in the title field above the editor. It's important that the file be named exactly this, as launching a two file Shiny application requires a directory to contain files named server.R and ui.R.
7. In the body of the file, paste the following example Shiny server code.
   
   

   # Rely on the 'WorldPhones' dataset in the datasets
   # package (which generally comes preloaded).
   library(datasets)
   
   # Define a server for the Shiny app
   function(input, output) {
    
    # Fill in the spot we created for a plot
    output$phonePlot <- renderPlot({
    
    # Render a barplot
    barplot(WorldPhones[,input$region]*1000, 
    main=input$region,
    ylab="Number of Telephones",
    xlab="Year")
    })
   }

8. Click Save when finished.
9. Click Add File again, and name the new file ui.R.
10. Paste in the following content, then click Save when finished.
    
    

    # Rely on the 'WorldPhones' dataset in the datasets
    # package (which generally comes preloaded).
    library(datasets)
    
    # Use a fluid Bootstrap layout
    fluidPage(    
      
      # Give the page a title
      titlePanel("Telephones by region"),
      
      # Generate a row with a sidebar
      sidebarLayout(      
        
        # Define the sidebar with one input
        sidebarPanel(
          selectInput("region", "Region:", 
                      choices=colnames(WorldPhones)),
          hr(),
          helpText("Data from AT&T (1961) The World's Telephones.")
        ),
        
        # Create a spot for the barplot
        mainPanel(
          plotOutput("phonePlot")  
        )
        
      )
    )
    

11. The last thing to do before publishing your App is to create an app.sh file. This is a Bash script that Domino runs after initializing the host that will serve your App. It should contain all commands required to launch your App. In this example, the only command you need is:
    
    

    R -e 'shiny::runApp("./", port=8888, host="0.0.0.0")'

    
    Make note of two important parameters in this command. Apps in Domino must run with a host of 0.0.0.0 on port 8888. This is where Domino will direct users to your application. Create the app.sh file the same way you did for server.R and ui.R, then save it.

Publish

 Now you're ready to publish your App.

1. Click Publish from the project sidebar.
2. Give your App an informative title and description, and set Permissions to Anyone can access. This will allow anyone with a network connection to your Domino deployment to access the App if they have the URL.
   
   
3. Click Publish.
4. Once the App status says Running, click View App to load your App. You should see the interactive bar chart with a Domino toolbar above it showing the project it's published from, plus buttons to email the App owner and open the description panel.
   
   

Share and consume

Now that your App is published, if you set the permissions to Anyone can access, you can now easily share it with colleagues who have access to your instance of Domino. You can try this out yourself by opening a private or incognito browser, or logging out of Domino, and navigating to the App URL.