shinyNodeProxy

shinyNodeProxy is a simple Node.js script for launching a single R shiny application or interactive document within a Node.js process manager: Phusion passenger. Using shinyNodeProxy with Phusion Passenger should keep alive your shiny app and help to solve some shiny-server limitation, shuch as load balancing on multiple R processes, SSL connexion or session monitoring. In this project, we use simple shortcut (start.sh, startSSL.sh and stop.sh) to configure and start the application through Phusion passenger.

This is an experimental project. Please send me a feedback if you find this script useful.

For production, please use the official shiny-server or shiny-server pro.

Alternative approaches:

• Load balancing: A Shiny-app Serves as Shiny-server Load Balancer

• User auth and ssl: How to add SSL and user authentication to shiny server using an nignx proxy

• Using shiny-server using a proxy: RStudio Server: Running with a Proxy

Usage

Prerequisite

• unix-like OS
• nodejs + npm
• R
• R package shiny
• phusion passenger

Installation and quick run

cd ~/yourProjectFolder/
git clone https://github.com/fxi/shinyNodeProxy.git
cd shinyNodeProxy
npm install 
start.sh

Configuration

• Set the path to your R shiny application in settings/settings.js

For launching the app in a cluster with passenger, the shell scripts stop.sh, start.sh and startSSL.sh could be use as shortcut and should be configured accordingly to your system.

• SSL certificate could be put in settings/ssl. Path can be changed in startSSL.sh.
• Cookie name, number of instance, http port, https port, and a lot more should also be configured in those start*.sh shell scripts.

Testing

You can test your R shiny application without launching a process manager: using R directly or shinyNodeProxy only.

R only

To manually start the shiny application, launch utils/runApp.R from the root of this project, with the port to listen and the path to your app:

Rscript utils/runApp.R 3838 inst/example

Node.js only

To start the application with node, use node (or nodejs) command. This will launch the port detection and the proxy.

node app.js

Structure of a working dir.

.
|-- README.md
|-- app.js # main application
|-- inst # Example of a simple  shiny app 
|   `-- example
|-- log # contains logs
|   |-- REAME.md
|-- node_modules # node modules
|   `-- http-proxy
|-- package.json # app dependencies
|-- public 
|-- settings # settings of the application: path to R shiny app, default port.
|   |-- settings.js
|   |-- settings.js.example
|   `-- ssl # Contains ssl certificate (optional)
|-- start.sh # Shortcut to launch the app whith passenger ( Edit this file to change passenger settings )
|-- startSSL.sh # Launch with ssl ( Edit this file to change passenger and ssl settings )
|-- stop.sh # Stop passenger.
`-- utils
    `-- runApp.R # Lauch R shiny app

Contribution

yes please !