Shiny is an R library that lets you turn almost any piece of analysis in R into an interactive app, without web-development skills. You can even incorporate Interactive maps and graphs using the Leaflet and Plotly libraries respectively. To get an idea of the possibilities have a look at Rstudio’s showcase of Shiny Apps.

Previously researchers would have to set up their own hosting solution or use a third-party provider to host their Shiny apps. Our new service will let researchers easily publish, update and remove their own apps, on a University of Manchester domain, without having to worry about server configuration.

To use the service, researchers will need to download an R package that will provide an RStudio add-in. Once this has been configured the user can publish or update an app by simply running the add-in in their Shiny project directory. The environment the app runs in will have the same R packages (and versions) available as when it is run on the researcher's local machine. The service will allow you to add, update and remove multiple apps and allow you to publish RMarkdown notebooks.

At present, the pilot only covers publicly accessible apps, and will be free to pilot participants. If your requirements are more complex, we may still be able to assist; please contact us for further details.

Resource for the free pilot scheme is limited so if you are interested in taking part please contact David Mawdsley, the Research Software Engineer leading the pilot service.