Deploying Apps with {golem}

Colin Fay

2020-07-30

About the run_app() function

When launching the app, you might have noticed that the dev/run_dev.R function calls run_app(), which has the following structure:

run_app <- function(
  ...
) {
  with_golem_options(
    app = shinyApp(
      ui = app_ui,
      server = app_server
    ),
    golem_opts = list(...)
  )
}

This function might looks a little bit weird, but there’s a long story behind it, and you can read more about it there.

But long story short, this combination of with_golem_options & golem_opts = list(...) allows you to pass argument to the function to be used inside the application, from UI or from server side, which you can get with get_golem_options().

run_app(this = "that")
# And in the app 
this <- get_golem_options("this")

The idea is to provide more flexibility for deployment on each platform you want to run your app on.

Deploying Apps with {golem}

The dev/03_deploy.R file contains function for deploying on various platforms.

RStudio Products

golem::add_rstudioconnect_file()
golem::add_shinyappsio_file()
golem::add_shinyserver_file()

Docker

# If you want to deploy via a generic Dockerfile
golem::add_dockerfile()

# If you want to deploy to ShinyProxy
golem::add_dockerfile_shinyproxy()

# If you want to deploy to Heroku
golem::add_dockerfile_heroku()