Sharing Shiny apps via the web

Running Shiny apps on your local machine (the computer you’re typing your code into) requires only RStudio and the shiny library to be installed. Deploying your apps to the web allows other to interact with them but requires the Shiny Server application to be installed where your app lives, there are three different places that shiny apps can live:

shinyapps.io
  • Publish apps to the web without any experience of setting up a server
  • Both free and paid subscriptions available
  • Read more…
Shiny Server Open Source
  • Host shiny apps on your own server or VPS
  • Free to use without support
  • Read more…
Shiny Server Pro
  • Host shiny apps on your own server or VPS
  • Commercial license (not AGPL) and support available
  • Read more…

Embedding Shiny apps in websites

Independently of where you deploy (or host) your apps, they can easily be embedded into webpages using iframes following this tutorial. It is also possible to embed applications into RMarkdown documents, as discussed here.


FAQ

It can be challenging at first to understand which of the above options you need for your use case, the following FAQ questions attempt to point you in the right direction

I have a Shiny app in RStudio and I want to push a button for it to appear online so others can use it

Good news! It’s very simple (and free) to use shinyapps.io to do this. If you have a popular Shiny app, or want to publish more tha 5 at once, you will need to pay for a shinyapps.io subscription.

I want to publish a Shiny app only some people can see, i.e. for it to be password protected.

You have two options:

Deciding between these two options will depend on a number of complicated factors, least of which being “do you know how to setup and run your own server?”.

I want to have a place my colleagues and I can publish Shiny apps collaboratively.

You have three options:

Deciding between these two options will depend on a number of complicated factors, least of which being “do you know how to setup and run your own server?”.