ShinyProxy is a novel, open source platform to deploy Shiny apps for the enterprise or larger organizations.

Embedding Shiny Apps

Although Shiny apps are very popular for interactive data analysis purposes, many organizations communicated a need to more closely integrate these apps within larger applications and portals. In previous releases we broke down the walls to make this happen: hiding the navbar, single-sign on, theming the landing page and advanced networking support were only a few steps in that direction. With ShinyProxy 2.0.1 we finished the job by implementing a REST API that allows to manage (launch, shut down) Shiny apps and consume the content programmatically in unprecedented ways. Data scientists can now keep ownership of their Shiny app knowing that it will seamlessly integrate with any other technology that is used by their organization’s websites, applications or portals.

OpenId Connect Authentication

A second break-through that made it to the 2.0.1 release is the support of an additional authentication / authorization technology. ShinyProxy already supports many technologies out of the box, including LDAP, social authentication (Github, facebook etc.) and single-sign on protocols, but with OpenId Connect we add another, modern protocol that e.g. allows to integrate with Auth0.

Miscellaneous improvements

In the authentication/authorization area and upon user request, we also added support for setting SSL/HTTPS modes in the Keycloak back-end for single sign-on. In terms of user experience, we now use the display-name of apps as browser tab name, so different Shiny apps in the browser can be more easily discriminated. Also, logging has been improved and the documentation was brushed up for the privileged setting in proxy.docker, proxy.kubernetes and for individual app containers.

Talking about documentation, be careful that a new YAML configuration is used in ShinyProxy 2.x.y which is slightly different from the 1.x.y versions.

Version 1.x.y:

shiny:
  proxy:
    ...
  apps:
  - name: 01_hello
    display-name: Hello Application
    description: Application which demonstrates the basics of a Shiny app
    docker-cmd: ["R", "-e", "shinyproxy::run_01_hello()"]
    docker-image: openanalytics/shinyproxy-demo
    groups: [scientists, mathematicians]

Version 2.x.y:

proxy:
     ...
  specs:
  - id: 01_hello
    display-name: Hello Application
    description: Application which demonstrates the basics of a Shiny app
    container-cmd: ["R", "-e", "shinyproxy::run_01_hello()"]
    container-image: openanalytics/shinyproxy-demo
    access-groups: [scientists, mathematicians]

There are many things cooking in the ShinyProxy kitchen and this change prepares for what is coming, but that will be the subject of a next blog post… In any case, updated documentation can be found on https://shinyproxy.io and as always community support on this new release is available at

https://support.openanalytics.eu

Don’t hesitate to send in questions or suggestions and have fun with ShinyProxy!